


Soldier

by Cephy



Category: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy XII, Fullmetal Alchemist, Last Remnant, Tales of Vesperia, Tales of the Abyss
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aliens, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Developing Relationship, Dystopia, Epic Battles, Forced Relationship, Human Experimentation, M/M, Military, Outer Space, Post-Apocalyptic, Rivalry, Saving the World, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-22
Updated: 2010-07-28
Packaged: 2017-10-12 09:58:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 47,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cephy/pseuds/Cephy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Squall Leonheart wakes up into the middle of a conspiracy and a mystery, in a city that used to be familiar.  But at least he's not the only one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I want it to be known that I never really intended this fic seriously-- I started writing it because I was bored and wanted to see how many different sources I could mash together and still be coherent. I did end up having a lot of fun with it, though, so here's hoping you do too. :D
> 
> Please note that some of the tagged characters are secondary and don't get a lot of screen time. Squall, Seifer, Luke, Guy, Roy, and to a slightly lesser degree Cloud turned out to be the stars of this particular show, so if you're here specifically for one of the others you may be disappointed.

_What do you think you're doin', lazy ass?_

It was dark. He was cold. That was all, at first: two thoughts, chasing him out of a drifting kind of oblivion. There was nothing, and then-- cold, dark. It was annoying.

He frowned. Thought about turning over, getting up, moving-- _gets the blood goin'_ , a voice out of memory said, _don't it?_

He tried to lift his arm, and found he couldn't move.

He tried to take a breath, but when he opened his mouth there was nothing to draw in.

He tried to open his eyes, but saw only black on black on black.

That was when Squall Leonheart truly woke up, and began to panic.

***

"Twenty-three!" Guy yelled to him. Luke didn't waste his breath on answering, just made a twist down the right corridor and kept on running. He counted the numbers off as he went, though he might not have bothered-- the hatch in question had a light blinking a warning red on its front, and a dark shape inside that was beginning to thrash.

The hatch beside it, Luke noted, was gaping open and empty, which could have been good or bad. But any further consideration of that was shoved to the back of his mind as he skidded to a halt on the slick metal floor and slammed a hand against the release button beside hatch number twenty-three. He all but held his breath as he waited to see if it would work-- and muttered a curse as the mechanisms ground to life too slowly. "Fine, then," he said to the wall, and as soon as he had the space he wedged his fingers into the gradually widening crack and pulled.

It meant that his hands were right in the way of the gush of steaming-cold mako that flooded out, the pumps operating just as slowly as the door mechanisms, but he gritted his teeth against the burn and kept pulling. He'd stewed in the stuff for enough years that he figured a little more wouldn't kill him.

Hopefully, anyway. He should probably remember to ask Guy about it later, just in case.

The gears gave one last grind and clank as the hatch wedged itself fully open, and Luke reached inside to pull the sliding shelf forward, watching carefully as the body on top of it reacted to the open air with a jerk-- the guy was breathing, though, in great heaving gulps, and while his eyes were hazy and confused they were open. Luke grinned in relief and turned his head to holler down the corridor.

"Got him!"

***

Light, suddenly, spearing through the blackness and right into his eyes, and someone or something was moving him, making the world spin around him. The cold only got worse, and his body nearly convulsed in an automatic shiver as the air hit it.

Someone was leaning over him-- shouting something, fuck that was loud-- and he couldn't even do anything to protect himself.

 _Wuss. You'd better hope you never see battle, Leonheart, or you're gonna be nothin' but a pile of meat by the end of the first day. Why the hell're you here, anyway?_

 _Shut up_ , he thought, and drew in a thick, shaky breath. "What," he croaked, then had to stop while he shook in a fit of coughing.

"Take it easy, man. You're all right-- we'll get you warmed up and walking around and you'll be just fine, you'll see."

"Cold," he managed next, though inwardly he cringed at the plaintive sound of his own voice.

"I know," the stranger said, "it'll wear off. Guy," he shouted again, making Squall wince, "blankets? Please?"

"All right, all right," a second voice said, further away but getting closer. Instinct tried to make Squall move away from the strangers, or even just _look_ at the second one as he approached, but his damnable body still wasn't listening to him the way it should. His attempt to shift just made the world spin again, and he had to close his eyes against it.

A moment later, though, something warm and soft wrapped itself around him, startling him into a gasp but fuck, it felt good. It nearly burned against his too-cold skin, and as soon as the warmth began to sink in he started to shiver hard enough to make him light-headed, but it was good. Hands on his arms held him steady while he shook, and eventually it eased to something more manageable.

He opened his eyes, squinted until the light seemed more bearable. The two faces above him didn't look threatening. Both were smiling, the redhead more so than the blond but both friendly enough, but there was something about being on his back and-- he shifted carefully under the heavy weight of the blanket, confirming his suspicions-- on his back and _naked_ in front of strangers that was making him twitch for a weapon.

This time when he tried to shift, the world stayed put. His two benefactors even helped steady him as he shakily came to a seated position and swung his legs off the little metal tray he'd been lying on. And if he had to wait there while his vision swam a bit more, well, at least he was improving.

He braced his arms and lifted his head, looking around. He was in some kind of hallway, lined with little square doors with control panels beside them-- the viewports set into the doors showed a lot of them as empty, though some were filled with something dark and murky. Everything else in sight was sterile white and grey, though with a kind of dusty and disused patina, a sense of age.

Eyeing the wall across from him, Squall froze for a moment as a possibility suggested itself--then turned his head slowly to look at the wall behind him.

His erstwhile bed was sticking out of one of those hatches, one that was currently empty but shone on the inside like an oil slick on water. The area inside was only just big enough for a person to lie flat.

Squall remembered the dark, and the cold, and decided that he needed to be away from there _right now_.

The two strangers seemed to be expecting it when he started struggling his way off the metal tray, gripping tight to the edge when it didn't seem like his legs would hold him and then gripping equally tight to the arms that came to help him put one foot in front of the other. The blanket got tucked firmly around his shoulders, still radiating welcome heat, but he still found himself shivering until they turned a corner and left that hallway full of tombs behind.

They emerged into a bigger room, with panels of machinery and monitors along most of the exposed walls. It looked a little less sterile than the hallways had-- the floor was a bit more worn down, stained darker in places, and there was dust building thickly in the corners. Most of the clutter had been shoved aside, though, by the other two people in the room--as Squall watched, one of them glanced up, saw them, and kicked a toppled chair aside to make room.

"Just the one?" that man asked. He was dark-haired, dark-eyed-- he had the look of a Wutaian in the shape of his features. The other man, too, once Squall looked for it, had a bit of that look to him, though the eyes threw him off at first-- an odd red-amber instead of the expected dark brown.

"None of the others responded," the redhead replied, sounding sad.

The dark-eyed Wutaian shrugged. "That wasn't unexpected, given the way things have gone so far."

"Others?" Squall asked sharply, pushing off his supporters and grabbing onto the wall instead, sliding down it until he was sitting on the floor. It wasn't much in the way of distance, but it felt better to have at least some space between him and them.

"You saw them," the red-eyed man said, barely turning away from the screen he was watching. The display flashed as he worked the controls, casting a pale glare on his face.

"Back there," the blond elaborated. "Most of the people they put in those things don't manage to get out again. You're lucky, in a way."

Squall thought back and remembered the darkened hatches amongst the empty ones. If each of those had held a body-- there would have been thirty, maybe fourty dead men in that hallway, and he knew he'd seen other similar hallways off to the side as they'd walked. "What is this place?"

The redhead crouched down a short distance away-- close enough to speak but not too close for Squall's comfort, which earned him a grudging kind of appreciation. He didn't answer Squall's question, though. "What do you remember?" he asked instead.

"I--" Squall started, then paused, thinking back and coming up with a disturbing number of blank areas in his memory. Some of it he could attribute to the lingering fuzziness in his head, but the rest-- some of the memories weren't just vague, they were _gone_. "I'm not sure," he eventually admitted, reluctantly. "I-- the academy. I was training at the Balamb Academy, getting ready to take the SEED exam."

The redhead glanced aside uncertainly at the dark-eyed man. "SEED?" he asked, which was strange, because there was hardly anyone in the three worlds who wouldn't have heard of the program.

"Mercenaries," the other man explained easily, as if to prove Squall's point. "An organized, well-trained troupe of mercenaries; Balamb was one of their training facilities."

"So you were military, kind of," the blond said, as if proving a point. "That fits the pattern."

"What pattern?" Squall demanded, getting irritated. "Would someone tell me what's going on?"

He saw the three of them-- only three, because the fourth was still intent on his data display--exchange looks. "Love to," the blond said, "but there's a lot that we don't know, either."

"That's why we're here," the redhead added earnestly. "We're trying to find out. And of course we're helping anyone still stuck like you were."

"Their records are nearly useless," the fourth man said suddenly, and it wasn't clear whether he was adding to the conversation or merely commenting on his own. "We won't get much from here, either, but I'll piece together what I can."

"Thanks, Vincent," the blond said, then turned his attention back to Squall and hesitated when he met Squall's increasingly irritated expression. "Look," he said, "I don't know whether this is any consolation, but the four of us--" He gestured, taking in the room's other inhabitants. "We're pretty much the same as you. We were being held the same way you were, just in different laboratories. Vincent and Roy," he added, gesturing at the two Wutaians, "woke Luke and I up the same way we did you. We don't know why, yet; we all have holes in our memory."

"In an attempt to find out," the dark-eyed man, Roy, added in, "we've been traveling to various facilities like this one, trying to track down any useful information. There's a bit more to it than that," he added with a shrug, "details and the like, but that's the essence of it."

Silence descended, the four strangers because they seemed to be waiting for a response-- or, in Vincent's case, just didn't care-- and Squall because he was still caught somewhere around the fact that nobody knew what the hell was going on. It was a bit hard to take, stuck in a place he didn't recognize with people he didn't know, weakened and all but defenceless and with some sort of faceless, mysterious mastermind hanging over them all--

He shoved against the wall, pushing himself up, following the sudden and pressing need he felt to see the sky. To breathe. The walls were starting to feel awfully close.

Practicality kept him from shoving Luke away when he stepped in close to help; if Squall hadn't been certain that he wouldn't make it to the door without the support, it would have been a different story. As it was, he was leaning heavily on Luke's arm by the time they'd gone through the narrow entryway and almost to what had to be the outer doors. He shook the support off, though, when they came close enough that he could put his own hands on the door itself and push hard. The heavy metal panel swung back with a startling _bang_.

The sky outside the door was heavy and grey, the air was thick with some metallic tang. But Squall still drew in a lungful of it, feeling the vague tension that had been building in him drain away until he could focus on the landscape and try to figure out where he was. From where they stood, he had a view downward over a large portion of some city; the ground beneath them wasn't ground, he discovered quickly, but metal-- they were elevated on a platform of some kind over who-knew-what. More city, probably.

There was something naggingly familiar about the cityscape, though, something that he couldn't quite put his finger on. It took staring at one particularly familiar tower for long minutes before it hit him, and then he was turning his head, following the streets, looking for landmarks and actually finding them--

"This is Balamb," he said numbly. "But it's-- what happened?"

Because the city he remembered wasn't broken the way this one was, wasn't sheathed in smoke and crumbled at the edges. But it was, undeniably, the same city. Which shouldn't have been possible, but--

"It's probably been a lot longer than you think," Luke said quietly. "I know it was for me. I'm still trying to get caught up on everything that's happened since-- since whatever happened, happened."

"How long--"

"Don't know. Maybe you'll get lucky and Vincent will find your file, then we'd be able to tell for sure."

Squall shook his head, not to deny anything-- though the concept of _lucky_ was a strange one to apply to the situation, he thought-- but just in reaction. And he looked out at what had been his city, and wondered just what the hell had happened.

***

Luke saw the exact moment that their newest acquaintance realized he was standing outside dressed in nothing but a thermal blanket. Which meant that most of the shock was worn off, which was good, but also probably meant that he'd be asking for clothes soon, which was a bit problematic. They didn't have much in the way of extra supplies, but if they ever intended to leave the lab-- which he certainly hoped they would, and soon-- the new guy would probably need some pants.

He was almost walking on his own, too, when they made their way back inside, though he still went back to the wall and sat down again, pulling the blanket around himself along with a thick silence. Luke left him for the moment, going over towards the main desk instead where Guy and Vincent were peering at the screen. Guy broke away and intercepted him before he got close, reaching out for his hands. "Let me see."

Luke rolled his eyes, but let the other man lift his hands and peer at the reddened skin. "It's nothing. I barely even feel it, and it'll be gone in an hour, so."

Guy looked up at him narrowly, then unerringly found the single blister on the inside of his wrist, pressing one finger lightly next to it and making Luke wince. "Barely feel it, hunh?"

"Well, it's mostly true," Luke muttered back sullenly. "Look, I didn't have any other choice, you know that."

"Yeah, I do," Guy agreed easily enough. "Doesn't mean I have to like it. Come on, I'll put something on this."

He could have protested-- because it would heal quickly enough, one advantage of their situation was that at least the little things didn't last-- but Guy had that look in his eyes that meant Luke would be better off saving his breath. So he let Guy take him over to their packs, spread on the salve they'd scavenged at the _last_ lab and wrap his palms in a loose bandage. They both went back over to Vincent, after, leaning over the back of his chair. "Anything?"

Vincent made a low sound of disgust. "A few reports that could turn out to be something, but I somehow doubt it. They're old enough that they might be able to tell us about the project's origins, or they might be maintenance records or an inventory of their office supplies. The text is partially corrupted, we won't know for certain what's in it until I've had time to work with it for a while." Vincent glanced up just once, eyes glinting red as they fixed across the room. "Go find out his name, so I can look for his records specifically."

Luke followed the look, saw the thick silence the new guy had wrapped around himself, and sighed inwardly. "Right," he muttered. He headed over to his pack, trying to think if his spare shirt was clean-- and he thought that maybe Guy's pants would fit, at least he hoped so, because he didn't want to have to try and convince Roy to share. He honestly wasn't sure Vincent even had any spare clothes; he certainly looked like he wore the same thing all the time.

A few minutes later, clothes in hand, he approached the new guy. "Hope these fit," he said by way of greeting. "We can find you something else when we get out of here, but for now I'm afraid this is all we've got."

The new guy snatched up the clothes pretty quickly, so that was probably a good sign. Luke took the chance and sank down to the floor a little bit in front of him, folding his legs. "So, you probably caught this already, but I'm Luke. That's Guy, Vincent, and Roy," he added, pointing at each of them in turn. Guy looked up and smiled at the sound of his name; Vincent continued ignoring everything. Roy, sitting a little apart from them all, looked on with an arched eyebrow.

"You--" Luke hesitated, because he knew it was a distinct possibility, but-- "Do you remember your name?"

He hadn't, not at first. He figured it was a valid question.

The new guy just blinked at him, giving up nothing, until--"Squall," he said.

Luke smiled. "Squall," he repeated. "Nice to meet you." Behind him, Luke heard Vincent start up a fresh burst of typing. He also heard Roy snort at him, to which he just rolled his eyes-- he was getting better at ignoring the older man's sarcasm, since he'd figured out that Roy mostly didn't mean anything by it.

Mostly. Sometimes he was just an asshole.

He was opening his mouth again to say something else-- he wasn't sure what, but he usually managed to come up with something, and he felt a little obliged to keep Squall talking now that he'd started. Except that before he could get to the point of actually making words, Vincent spoke.

"Got it," he said, and instantly had everyone in the room's attention. "Squall Leonheart, born 640 A.C., correct?"

Squall nodded wordlessly. Roy gave a low whistle. "You're looking good for a seventy year old," he said, offhand, and Luke winced even as Squall's eyes went a little wide.

"Seventy," he said in a flat tone. He glanced over at Luke, as if for confirmation, and Luke reluctantly nodded.

"Told you it had been longer than you thought," he offered weakly.

"Discuss it later," Vincent said. "I have as much information as we're going to get, I think."

"Good," Guy said. "Then let's get out of here."

If he'd expected Squall to argue, Luke would have been disappointed. But he remembered when he'd been in that position, and he caught the wary looks that Squall kept sending down the hall, so it would have been more surprising if he hadn't been more than ready to leave. What was a little startling was that Squall pushed up the wall, borrowed clothes held tightly to his chest, and spoke without any prompting. "I know roughly where we are in the city," he said. "I know where my old barracks used to be-- if the Academy is still there, they might have more information about what happened to me."

"Is that wise?" Roy said. "It's entirely possible that they're the ones who put him in here in the first place. And it's just as possible that the facility is no longer there, given everything else that's happened in the meantime."

"I think it's worth checking out," Guy said with a narrow look at Roy. "We'll be careful, obviously, but at the very least we might find somewhere to hole up for a few days and rest while Vincent tries to make sense of this."

Roy held up his hands in surrender, shaking his head. "I'm merely presenting all of the options," he said mildly.

"Right, then," Luke said, standing as well. "Balamb Academy it is."


	2. Chapter 2

Roy was a soldier, Squall could tell by the way he held himself, his movements-- it was familiar, since he'd been trained alongside a whole group like him. The other three, though, they didn't move the same. They were strong, no doubt, but they didn't have the same enforced control of someone who'd run endless drills under a sergeant's watchful eye.

The one called Vincent had an entirely different kind of control, and it reminded Squall uneasily of the training drones the instructors had once brought out against his class. They'd been put in darkened rooms, and the drones had come sweeping down silently from the ceiling corners, smooth-jointed, there and gone again in a blink. That was the sort of control Vincent had, the kind of stillness that hid a threat until it was right on top of you. If he'd been trained as a spy or an assassin at some point, Squall would not have been surprised.

The other two were harder to figure out until he realized why the peculiar swagger they both had looked familiar: he'd seen the same type of movement from the few instructors at the Academy who still favoured swords as their primary weapons. It came from having a blade at your hip, learning how to move with it and not smack yourself in the legs all the time. Guy and Luke did it more naturally than even those masters had ever done, which made him wonder just how many years _they'd_ been stuck in a tube.

All in all, they made an odd but dangerous group descending down into the city. Even if they didn't seem to have a single weapon between them, but good weapons weren't easy to come by. Who knew what the hell had happened to his own gear.

He found himself hoping the Academy was still there. It had always been a pain in the ass, but he was reasonably certain he could find a weapon there, or at the very least some clothes. He was keenly aware that he was wearing borrowed clothing, and not only because nothing fit quite right. He knew that when trainees didn't make it through the program, their belongings were boxed and sent to their families-- or stored in an infamous room in the main building's basement.

It would probably feel a little like grave robbing, going through all of those boxes, but Squall wasn't entirely sure he cared.

Once on street level, Squall quickly figured out that they were in one of the industrial districts, formerly filled with neat blocks of dull grey buildings, nameless and windowless and official. Whatever they had once been, they'd fallen into disrepair along with everything else, but Squall had to admit they were the perfect location for an operation like the one he'd somehow found himself in the middle of.

It wasn't hard to plot them a course through the city to their destination. It wasn't even that far, the Academy having been built away from the main residential and business areas-- in theory because the Academy's founders had wanted to avoid disturbing the city residents, but mainly Squall figured that those residents weren't too fond of having would-be-mercenaries shooting at things in any proximity to their back yards.

When they arrived, the gates at the edge of the Academy property were bent from their hinges, the metal plaque that had once announced its presence was scratched over and all but illegible. That, more than anything, served to bring home to Squall that it really might have been fifty years later than his mind told him it should be-- ridiculous to doubt it, given everything else he'd seen, but it was only in that moment that it somehow became real. There was rust on the broken hinges; the deeply gouged scratches were weathered to the same colour as the rest of the plaque.

Squall looked beyond the gates, at the bulk of the Academy buildings standing hazy in the distance, and wondered what else they'd find.

 _What a shithole, hunh, princess? They think I'm gonna cozy up with all these other guys, make my bed and shine my boots like a good little soldier, fuck, they got another thing comin'. You wait and see, I'm gonna rule this place._

In the end, it was a little disappointing. Whatever signs there might have been of what had happened, they'd weathered away long since. The buildings were even mostly intact, though the administration complex had gaping holes where its banks of shiny windows had been, and when they passed by their boots crunched on hidden shards of broken glass. Everything was empty-- the grass on the practice yard was waist-high and gone to seed, wilder than the groundskeepers had ever let it grow in Squall's day. It was quiet, no one yelling and no guns firing.

At a questioning look, Squall pointed them towards the barracks, and trailed along after them in a stunned kind of silence as they started out.

The barracks was just a series of long, narrow rooms filled with bunks, arrayed around a central mess hall. Inside, Squall saw with something like relief, the signs were a little more immediate. The tables were toppled, or broken, or in one memorable case charred at the edges-- though that could easily have been the result of an over-enthusiastic student with his first blast rifle. The floor was littered with the debris of the lives of those who had lived there once, papers and bits of gear mixed with the grass and dust tracked in by countless boots.

"This," Squall heard Luke mutter, "is freaking creepy. Where is everyone? You'd think even if the place had been abandoned, you'd have squatters or someone else coming in to use the space."

"Don't knock it," Guy murmured back, sounding kind of amused. "All the better for us; this'll be a great place to set up for a few days, if there's really no one around."

"Don't speak too soon. Look," Roy said quietly, pointing. They looked, and saw footprints marked into the dust on the floor, more recent than they had any right to be. "We should search the building," Roy went on, still not much louder than before-- there was something about the silence that was oppressive. "Split up, make sure--"

Even as he was saying that, one of the doors at the far end of the hall swung open hard, and a tall figure in a long pale coat strode through. It kicked at a fallen chair, cursed at a few random objects as he kicked them aside, and finally noticed the lot of them standing near the doorway. Broad shoulders squared aggressively as the newcomer started their way.

"Who th' fuck are you?" he demanded. "What th' fuck is goin' on here?"

The words sent a shock down Squall's spine; he was stepping forward before he knew it, taking a few steps towards the newcomer, not even really seeing their face-- he did see that person's eyes land on him, though, and widen, as the angry words cut off mid-breath.

Squall's feet kept carrying him forward; he was only a few steps away, within touching distance.

He kept moving, the other person kept moving. They met in mid-step, arms coming up to clutch, mouths clashing hard enough that Squall tasted blood.

From a distance, he heard a groan. "Not again," Roy's voice said.

"Come on," Guy's voice added quietly. "The least we can do is not give them an audience."

He might have heard the sound of a door opening and closing after that, but it didn't seem important. What was important was the way hands were clutching at his hips, pulling him forward, the way his own hand was holding a fistful of hair to keep their mouths firmly together. He didn't feel the impact of his knees on the floor, but he noticed when the other person gave a heave and pressed his back down on the stone, rolling over top of him, grinding down and down and again until he himself broke the lock of their lips and tossed his head back with a shout that was soon echoed into the skin of his throat.

Panting, Squall lay with his eyes closed, limp on the floor with the other's body on top of him-- and slowly, as he caught his breath, started to realize what he'd just done.

He went rigid under the other's body, felt the other jerk away a few inches at the exact same moment. Looking up, he met a pair of eyes that were just as startled and confused as he felt, which would have been reassuring if he hadn't recognized the face they were attached to.

"You," he spat, and saw the face above his go completely closed for the instant before an all-too-familiar smirk spread out to fill the void.

"Well, now," said the voice from his memory. "Hello, princess."

***

Guy made sure to make a little extra noise while digging through the pile of boxes in the corner--not that they could hear anything through he thick concrete of the walls, but it somehow seemed the polite thing to do, just in case. He noticed Luke being a little more enthusiastic than usual, too, in pulling out the few food supplies they had left and taking stock.

The turn of events wasn't surprising, not really-- it was something they had already come to accept as part of the whole mess that was their new and altered lives. Didn't make it any less awkward to see happening right in front of them. And for Luke and him, at least, it was personal-- they knew what it was like to be the ones in that position, after all.

Guy couldn't remember much about the moment Vincent had pulled him bodily out of the tank he'd been sealed in-- not as refined a design as the one in which they'd found Squall, being probably the better part of a century older. The hatch on the front of it very nearly hadn't opened at all, and he'd been running out of air, or whatever passed for air-- he'd been panicking, with his vision starting to go dark, and then there was a hand around his wrist and he was hauling in great gasps of air through lips that felt numb and swollen with cold.

Those moments-- he was grateful, most days, that he only vaguely remembered them.

What he did remember, with a vivid clarity, was looking over just moments later as Roy hauled a gasping Luke out of the tube next to him, both of them dripping with some dark, greenish liquid. Guy was pretty sure he could barely sit up at that moment, much less stand, but he'd somehow managed to be at Luke's side in the next moment, shoving Roy out of the way with a strength that surprised him.

He had barely been able to breathe himself until Luke had finally drawn a breath without coughing, and opened his eyes. They had looked at each other--

And then somehow, they had been clinging to each other, rolling across the floor heedless of the empty hatches gaping in the wall behind them and the two men looking on not more than five paces away. Later, he would never be able to describe why, exactly, it had happened-- it had simply been impossible not to. In that moment, the only thing in the world that mattered had been Luke.

They had been mortified, after; Luke hadn't been able to meet either of their new companions' eyes for days. He'd barely been able to meet _Guy's_ eyes, after coming back to himself naked and wrapped around him on the floor of some mad scientist's laboratory.

It obviously had something to do with whatever had been done to them. He could tell when Luke was hurt; his own hands still itched from the after-effects of phantom mako burns. And there were times when he just needed to touch, needed to reassure some part of himself that Luke was alive and breathing and _there_. Beyond that, though, they just didn't have the information to say anything for sure. No one could adequately explain why the connection took them so hard the first time, or why it happened between some of them and not others. He and Luke had never been intimate before, not in all the years they'd known each other, but they'd come together without hesitation that first time, without even thinking about it, without being able to think about anything else.

It had gotten easier, in the long months since that moment. The overwhelming need that still overcame them sometimes was a little disconcerting, but it seemed unavoidable, so-- Guy had started trying to accept that this was simply the way things now were. In the long run, after all, there were worse fates than needing to have very good, regular sex with your best friend for the rest of your life.

"We need to resupply before we move on," Luke said at last, one hand rummaging in their packs and a faint frown on his face. "I don't really like the idea of spending too much time in the city, but--"

"There may be supplies here that we could salvage," Roy suggested, lifting a brow, and Guy wrinkled his nose.

"Freeze-dried crap," Luke muttered, clearly sharing the sentiment. "Yeah, I mean, we'll take that with us if we find it," he went on, louder, "but it'd be good to have something fresh for a change, don't you think, while we've got the cha--"

The door banged open with enough force to rebound off the wall as Squall came storming in, looking a little dishevelled and thoroughly pissed-- and not meeting any of their eyes, so probably embarrassed as well. Guy barely knew the man, but he seemed the type that wouldn't let himself be seen to lose control very often. There were a few bunks still standing in the room, though the mattresses were slashed or stained or just plain missing. Squall threw himself down on one of them, regardless. He put his back to the rest of the room, and didn't move.

Guy started to count down, knowing what was probably coming next. Sure enough, when he hit one the stranger shoved through the door after Squall, eyes immediately searching for and settling on the body on the cot. The body which was still resolutely turned away despite having undoubtedly heard the door.

When he saw Squall, only then did the stranger's shoulders relax, the faint frown on his face disappear. It was with a great show of nonchalance that he sauntered over to the rest of them and nodded a greeting.

"So," the man said in a tone of casual arrogance, "I'm guessin' I'm not the only one lost in the middle of someone else's fuck-up." He stopped at the edge of their circle, and jerked his chin in a kind of greeting. "Seifer Almasy."

Guy nodded slowly in return, eyeing the newcomer speculatively-- there was a scar between his eyes, a mirror of the one on Squall's face, and he wondered if there was a story there-- then shrugged it off with a faint smile. The guy looked cocky, sure, but he'd grown up around royalty and had a bit of a tolerance for that sort of thing. "Guy Cecil," he said in return, then went around the circle and made introductions.

Seifer took it all in with a deceptively careless air, then without another word settled himself next to their food and started rummaging. He pulled out a sealed, foil-wrapped package and made a face. "More of the same shit. What I wouldn't give for a steak, eh?" Seifer gave them all a sidelong grin, and Guy had to laugh. It was a universal constant: every soldier loved his food.

"Have you found supplies in here?" Luke asked.

"Like this? Yeah, there's stuff stashed in a few places, if you know where to look. Looks like the entire Academy got pretty much stripped clean, but obviously not by anyone who'd actually gone here, y'know?"

"The armory?" Squall asked, breaking his silence and rolling over.

"Still there," Seifer answered, then swung to his feet when Squall rolled over and started for the door. "Whoa, whoa; hold up, princess. Plenty of time for that. Right now I'd like to hear what the nice people have to say about what the fuck is going on."

"Feel free," Squall muttered. But when Seifer stepped between him and the door, he stopped instead of moving to step around. "Fuck off, Seifer," he said lowly.

"Yeah, you looked like you enjoyed that," Seifer shot back with a sharp little grin. "But maybe not right now, hunh?"

Squall's glare intensified; Guy winced and wondered whether they were going to be witness to a fight-- or to another awkward scene like earlier. But in the end Squall just growled under his breath and spun on his heel to come sit near the rest.

"You care to elaborate on all those things you don't know?" Squall said challengingly, obviously still pissed, and embarrassed, and pissed as a result of being embarassed. He was very carefully ignoring the presence of Seifer in the room, now that he wasn't facing the man directly. "I think there may be a few parts you left out."

Seifer, for his part, snatched up one of the packets of rations and tore it open as he settled to the floor, appearing to ignore Squall as well.

Guy sighed inwardly. Yeah, this wasn't going to be awkward at all.

"This is what we've been able to piece together," he said, when no one else volunteered to start. "Sometime in the past, a group of scientists started to collect human subjects. It started at least a couple hundred years ago, because that's when Luke and I were taken," he added tonelessly. Seifer's eyes went a little wide for a second; Squall remained expressionless. "We don't know why they did it. We don't know exactly what they did to us. Whatever it was, it's made us stronger, faster than we were before. We've been reluctant to be seen to carry weapons, but the times we've used them, we were all better with them than we ever remember being."

"Whatever they did," Roy added quietly, "it was intended to make us better soldiers. It seems obvious to me that they meant us for war."

Guy nodded, conceding the point without a fight. "We, personally, have investigated four facilities like the one we found you in, Squall. Looking for information and survivors, as we said. There are two other teams out looking, as well, in different parts of the world, and we'll meet up again with them once we search one last location."

"How many of you are there?" Seifer asked curiously.

"Alive?" Roy remarked. "Far fewer than were the alternative."

"When we split up, there were eleven of us," Luke said. "Now there are the two of you, too, plus anyone that the other teams managed to find. We're out of contact with them, so we can't say for sure."

"Why not just ask?" Seifer asked snidely. "How long you guys been locked up, anyway, that you haven't heard of phones?"

"Communications are mostly down," Roy said sharply. "Planetwide and inter-world, save for a few very tightly controlled private networks. You've been out for a while too, remember; don't assume you know anything."

"That's the next part," Guy cut in, before things could get ugly. "At some point, while we were all out, something big happened. Whatever it was, it ended in riots and the complete and total collapse of government."

"Which government?" Squall asked.

"All of them," Roy answered somberly.

"In any case," Guy continued, "when all of that went down, the labs were abandoned with the test subjects still inside. The worlds went to shit, and here we are," he finished with a shrug.

"Sounds like fun," Seifer commented, with a smile that said he maybe wasn't joking. "Wish I coulda seen it."

Squall very nearly glared at Seifer, but Guy saw him catch himself in time. "None of this answers the question of why," he challenged, staring intently around the rest of the circle instead.

"That," Guy said flatly, "is what we really don't know. And what we've been working on finding out."

***

"So," Seifer drawled when the conversation had lagged too long-- he'd never enjoyed silences, especially when there were still things that people needed to tell him. "What about what happened to me an' the princess here? Not that I've ever been that picky about what I fucked," he added, just for fun, "but this is a bit much even for me."

Squall didn't say anything, didn't so much as twitch a muscle in that tight little scowl of his, but long practice let Seifer know that the remark hit home.

"It happens sometimes," the skinny blond one, Guy, said uncertainly, looking back and forth between him an' Squall, kinda wary. Smart, that one; they'd nearly broken one of their classmates' ribs for him once when the guy was stupid enough to get between them. Hadn't meant to, but really, the guy shoulda known better. He wouldn't've made a good SEED anyway, if he didn't know how to read the situation. "This'll be the third time that we know of. So far it's been between people who knew each other before-- sounds like that's still true."

"Oh yeah, me an' Squall here go way back." He tapped a finger against the scar on his forehead, and knew the others would draw the connection between it and the one decorating Squall's own face.

"Okay, well, best guess is that it's either a side-effect of something else they did to us, or something they tried that just went wrong."

Luke snorted. "Yeah," he muttered, "if they actually intended _that_ , then they were all just a bunch of perverts."

Seifer couldn't help but agree.

"So, what happens, then? I wake up, I see the princess here and get the urge to fuck him through the floor, that's it, we're done?" he pushed on, and not only because it was making Squall squirm on the inside. Because that _wasn't_ it, and he knew it even before the others exchanged those fucking annoying looks that people gave each other when they didn't want to tell the truth. He could _feel_ Squall like an itch in his brain, and he'd already had to stop himself twice from reaching out just to touch his arm or some shit, what the _fuck_. Whatever was going on, it wasn't over.

"You know what," he said before anyone else could decide, "never mind. I'm sick of talkin'." He grabbed another pack of the tasteless rations, and stood-- feeling the pull of _Squall_ behind him like a cord hooked into his gut, trying to haul him back to the sullen bastard's side. It wasn't any words of his that had made Squall stay earlier, he knew; it had to be the same sort of pull in him.

 _Just fuckin' peachy_ , he thought sourly. And the worst of it was that he had no fucking idea what to do about it.

***

"You guys wanna get yourselves some weapons, or what?" Seifer called over his shoulder, heading for the door.

Squall was up almost instantly, though he managed to do it while still maintaining an air of indifference, which was impressive. Roy had to admire the man's stubborn, sullen adherence to his grudge, even if it was more than a little childish.

Roy himself stood and stretched, following more sedately-- more out of curiousity than anything else, but he supposed it couldn't hurt to see what sorts of things the famed mercenary academy was capable of squirreling away. The others fell in behind as well, and they made an odd little cavalcade following the broad form of Seifer through the twists of hallway. They eventually found themselves in some remote corner of some basement of a building at the far edge of the complex, shouldering open a heavy door that showed only darkness inside until Seifer slammed a hand into the solar switch, activating the single dim bank of lights that, by some miracle, still worked.

The collection revealed, Roy had to admit, was impressive.

"Holy shit," he heard Luke breathe behind him. "Where did all of these come from?"

"It's not the official Academy armory, if that what you're wonderin'," Seifer said, remarkably offhand for someone standing in front of enough various weaponry to arm a small country. "This is stuff the students found, bought, stole, borrowed, built, salvaged, whatever. Unofficial, y'know? Kind of an unspoken rule that you take what you need, give back what you don't, and don't rat to the instructors about it."

"Like they didn't know," Roy heard Squall mutter. Seifer obviously heard him as well, because he snorted.

"Yeah, well, most of them graduated from here, so, obviously. But that just meant they knew the rules, too."

The others finally broke tableau, wandering into the room to poke at the items lining the walls. Roy glanced over some of the pieces right near the door, smiling bemusedly when he caught sight of something that looked like _plate armour_ at the back, directly off a page in a history book. He wondered just how long the students of Balamb had been building their collection, and whether they ever actually threw anything out.

"Here's a question," Seifer said, drawing his attention. The tall man was standing a few short steps to one side, watching the others search. "Why aren't you guys armed already?"

"We had weapons," Roy corrected, "but we left them outside the city. Didn't want to draw that kind of attention with so many people around."

Seifer arched an eyebrow, looking down at him from that annoying height. "Can't say I think that much of you leavin' your defences behind like that."

Roy sighed inwardly, not surprised that it had come to this-- Seifer was obviously used to being in charge of his own little sphere, and to challenging anyone who entered it. Roy, however, figured that he was far too old to be involved in that sort of business, and quite frankly he was tired of the posing and posturing. So he bent and picked up a piece of that old armour, some heavy molded thing that probably weighed as much as some children. He held it up between them at head-height-- and squeezed, bending it easily into a twisted scrap of iron. When he let go, it felt to the floor with a _clang_ , the marks of his fingers still clearly visible at the narrowest point. "If we needed to defend ourselves," he said mildly, "we could."

Seifer's eyebrows went up; Squall, watching from a short distance away, looked reluctantly impressed. And moments later both gained a speculative look about them; Roy caught Seifer eyeing the rest of that suit of armour, like maybe he wanted to try, and sighed again.

 _Children._

Luke made a vague sound of discovery from deeper in the room; they turned to find him holding up a sword, solid and worn but obviously well-made even to Roy's admittedly limited experience. Guy, curious, started poking in the same corner, and eventually he pulled out another sword, long and slender and desperately in need of honing, but he gave it a long speculative look and brought it over into the light regardless.

Vincent was looking at the selection of guns; Roy went over to join him, a little more curious than he'd been. The quality of the collection truly was far better than the few stockpiles they'd been able to find to that point, he admitted to himself. If he could find something that suited him better than the substandard stock they'd scavenged before--

Vincent tossed him a piece before he'd done more than glance at the first rack. "Incendiary rounds," he said. "Limited stock, but there's a reloader."

"Really, now. That sounds promising." He looked at the piece with a new interest, hefting it experimentally. Not too heavy, not too big-- it might be useful to have. Most people these days, as they'd seen in their travels, had moved away from projectile weapons, likely due to the increasingly limited supply of ammunition. Even the energy technology that had been under development when he remembered being free, which had apparently seen much heavier use in the following decades, had also been set aside because they were difficult to recharge and maintain without dedicated facilities. So they were back to melee warfare once again, which was rather amusing in an abstract sort of way. Hundreds of years of development, and they were still left to kill each other with their bare hands.

Still, it meant that warriors like Luke and Guy weren't at nearly the disadvantage they might have been. And it meant they could all be confident that they could defend themselves with their bare hands, if need be-- the weaponry that could have stopped them was, for the most part, long gone.

The sound of metal on stone, ringing, came from behind, and he glanced over to find Squall pulling out a bright, deadly-looking gunblade. Obviously familiar to him, from the comfortable way he held it, the way he automatically flicked open all of the appropriate chambers to check for wear or rust. If Seifer's explanation of this room was to be believed then maybe it had been his, once upon a time. Or maybe he'd just used something similar; either way, it was good choice so long as he knew how to use it. Best of both worlds, the new and the old.

Seifer waited by the door, arms crossed over his chest, waiting for them and looking vaguely amused. When they were done, they each had a few things of interest, to be picked over and cleaned upstairs where it was more comfortable.

Seifer led the way again, though he broke off briefly to duck into another of the barracks rooms. He was back before Squall could do more than twitch in his direction, carrying a small bundle of clothes and a gunblade of his own slung over one shoulder. He wordlessly carried those few of his belongings in to the room they'd claimed as their own, settling them with the other packs and just sort of-- making himself at home. The boy certainly didn't lack for confidence, Roy reflected wryly, that was certain.

Luke yawned, and tried to stifle it; Guy said something quietly to him, prompting an equally quiet laugh, and the two of them wandered off to the bunks, arranging their blankets on one of the more intact mattresses and curling up together. Roy saw Seifer following them with a quirked eyebrow, before his eyes slid to Squall again, narrow, considering.

Squall, stiff-backed, went back to the bunk he'd been using earlier and sat down with his gunblade across his lap, beginning to clean it carefully. Roy snorted to himself; the message couldn't have been clearer. He'd probably sleep with the damned weapon beside him that night, too.

Those two would really have to work things out, soon, if they wanted to be able to function at all. Though it certainly was amusing to watch them try to pretend nothing was going on, he imagined there was only so much of it any of them would be able to take.


	3. Chapter 3

The entire complex was silent, unnaturally so when he knew what it had once been like-- still, the archive room felt even more silent, somehow. The long shelves of boxes upon boxes were oppressive, neatly labelled with the names of the dead.

Squall slapped the light panel on the wall and pushed into the room regardless, letting the door thump closed behind him.

It was a morbid sense of curiousity that had him go searching-- an urge that he almost regretted in the moment that he actually found the box with his own name on it. Leonheart, Squall. His ID number and rank, and that was it. He stood there for a while staring at it before he made himself flip open the lid.

Inside was a bunch of random crap-- loose pages of notes gone dry and brittle with age, the odd collection of miscellany that had been in his desk, the bit of trim that had come off his uniform and that he'd never got around to fixing. But beneath all of that-- his own clothes, leather and synthetic as good as if it hadn't been fifty years since he'd worn them. He pulled them out gratefully, sorted it out and took stock, then changed right there in the storage room. He nearly tossed the old set aside when he was done, but remembered at the last moment that they were just a loan and hung onto them instead. He did make a mental note to give the others directions to this room, though, so that they could maybe find something for themselves that was a little less worn out.

The dead wouldn't need of any of this; might as well get used.

He hesitated when he was done, toying with the impulse to see if he could find the boxes of his few friends from back in the day-- mostly, he knew, putting off the inevitable return to that room with the strangers he now appeared to be stuck with, and Seifer fucking Almasy.

Fucking Seifer _fucking_ Almasy.

He'd had to force himself out of the room, earlier. Had nearly not been able to walk out and leave the big asshole lying there asleep. It was ridiculous. He'd tried to split the man's head open once, and now he was apparently all but glued to his side.

Still, he couldn't stay there with the boxes forever, and fuck, it wasn't like he was going to _hide_.

He was just heading back towards the door when it banged open on its own-- and into the room stalked the object of his thoughts in the flesh. Furiously scowling, hands clenched at his sides, shoulders bunched-- all the signs, in the language of Seifer, of spoiling for a fight. Squall braced himself and waited for the storm to hit.

He also ruthlessly squashed the little part of him that was relieved at the sight.

"The fuck did you go?" Seifer growled, still coming forward, not slowing down. Squall stood his ground but Seifer just bowled on forward until he had Squall backed into the wall, and damn the fact that Seifer was so much taller than him, anyway, because otherwise the move would never have worked. Squall tipped his chin and stared down his nose at the other man, regardless, and didn't flinch when his back pressed into cold concrete.

"None of your business."

"You think?" Seifer gritted. "If you'd been payin' attention to your new friends when they were layin' shit out earlier, you might remember when they told us that we're pretty much hardwired to each other now. If you'd been payin' attention to pretty much anythin' at all, you'd have figured out that I found you here by feelin' out where you were _with my mind_. So yes, it fucking well _is_ my business."

"Get off me," Squall said, as coldly as he could manage.

"No," Seifer answered easily. He had both hands pressing Squall's shoulders to the wall, one leg effectively immobilizing his lower body as well. "Not until you stop being a dick."

"Me?" Squall said incredulously. He decided he'd had enough; shoving up and out, he loosened the grip on him long enough to get halfway free, managed to dig a knee into the cluster of nerves in Seifer's thigh and heard him spit a curse. Squall struggled and pulled, working himself nearly free before a still-cursing Seifer managed to firm his grip again.

Seifer's body pressed against his in one long, hot line; both of them were breathing hard. He could feel Seifer's heartbeat against his bracing arms.

He had one moment to feel a horrified sort of realization before he was kissing Seifer again, worrying at his lip while the grip on his shoulder slid unerringly down to the button of his pants, opening it, sliding inside, and then Squall was tossing his head back hard enough to see stars at the impact of skull on cement. He felt another quick burst of pain as Seifer's mouth fastened on his throat instead, teeth scraping and digging in. Groaning, Squall started tugging at Seifer's clothes as well, needing to feel warm skin, needing to get closer to that heartbeat.

It was over embarrassingly quickly, and not quickly enough.

"Son of a bitch," he heard Seifer mutter, as the hand touching him withdrew. He just kept his eyes closed, waiting until he was released, then shoved off the wall and stalked away as well as he could while trying to do up his pants at the same time.

"Squall--"

He shook off the hand that tried to catch his arm, and something snapped. He spun on Seifer and got right up in his face. "What do you want?" he hissed. "What do you think is going on? I don't like you, you don't like me, I doubt fifty years in a tube has done anything to change the reasons for that. If you need another scar to prove it, I'll be happy to oblige."

During his little speech, Seifer's face clouded over with anger. "Well, princess, that may be true, but we still have to live with this. So I suggest you maybe get that stick out of your ass an' get over yourself."

He wanted to walk away. Tried to, but he barely got out the door before something jerked him to a stop, his already-unsettled state and whatever it was that the damned scientists had done to him not letting him take another step. And Seifer took his sweet time coming out that door, looking smug when he saw Squall waiting, like he'd proven some point.

Squall wanted to leave that infuriating, smirking face behind in the dirt. He wanted to go and kill something, only the training facility was a wreck, the drones probably long since broken, and he couldn't get more than ten paces away without that hook in his gut pulling him back.

He wanted to _scream_ , but he wouldn't give Seifer the satisfaction.

***

It took Vincent several hours working on their tiny, patched-together datascreen to get the files he'd scavenged from the lab into order. Most of it was useless, but there were some interesting references-- frustratingly, the things being referred _to_ were nowhere to be found, but it was a start. The next lab, maybe, would have a more intact system, would have been higher-up on the chain of command. Or maybe one of the other groups would have the missing piece, and it would all make sense when they met up and put it all together.

A slim chance, but he supposed they had to hope.

They'd found a broken table in one corner of the room, which had been successfully patched enough to stand upright. Luke, Guy, and Roy were using the surface to pore over their much-annotated maps, trying to decide on a route while their newest two were off who-knew-where. Vincent, at least, had been awake when Leonheart slipped quietly out into the hallway, earlier-- someone had to keep watch, after all-- but everyone had woken when Almasy went slamming out the door a short time later, his face like a descending storm cloud.

"We could take the rail line as far as North Corel?"

"Might be better to get off at the outpost, here; it'll be a longer trip, by the numbers, but we won't have to cross these hills so it'll probably still go faster."

"If we cut south towards Esthar from there, we might even be able to hitch a ride the rest of the way. That was a pretty major trade route, from what I remember; I can't imagine it's changed that much."

The door slammed open again, crashing against the wall, and Vincent glanced over sourly. He was getting rather tired of that. This time, however, it was Leonheart, with Almasy just behind, and there was a dark purplish mark on Squall's neck that explained why he was scowling so fiercely.

Almasy made a good show of being unconcerned, but his posture and expression were both tight with residual anger as he came over to the others and leaned on the table. "What's the plan?"

Guy tapped a point on the map-- "Mideel," he said. "The last lab that we have a location for is there. After that, east again to meet up with the other groups on the Kimlascan border."

"Or whatever it's called, now," Luke muttered. He sighed and straightened, stretching up until something popped. "So," he went on, "you coming with us?"

Almasy laughed, though the sound wasn't particularly humourous. "Do I have a choice?"

Luke rolled his eyes. "You've always got a choice."

"Somehow I doubt that," Almasy repled sourly. And he didn't actually look at Leonheart, but he might as well have because they could all see it anyway. "Seems like I lost my choices when someone doped me up and stuffed me in a tank. And I wanna figure out why, so yeah, I'm goin' with you." He grinned, sidelong; a predator's smile. "Guess that's kind of a choice. Good enough."

"So, okay, I've been wondering," Luke said after a pause. "How did you get out, anyway? Of your tank?"

"Get out?" Almasy repeated blankly. "The thing opened right up. Few hours before you guys showed, maybe, so I figured you had something to do with it."

At that, Vincent looked up sharply. "Where were you?"

"Basement below medical. Fucking freezing down there."

Another facility. Secondary, from the sound of it, but perhaps-- "Were there any datascreens, file cabinets, anything like that?"

"No," Almasy answered slowly, visibly thinking back. "I mean, it's a bit fuzzy, and mostly I just wanted to get the fuck outta there, y'know? Pretty sure it was just a couple of those freaky glass coffins full of green shit. There was all sorts of equipment upstairs, but it was pretty smashed up."

"His tank must have triggered when we activated Squall's," Guy said, frowning. "But why would he be all the way over here, away from the main lab?"

Vincent flipped to his datascreen. When he'd pulled Leonheart's file, he'd also pulled the ones directly attached to it-- which included, he found, a brief note on one Seifer Almasy, referred to by initials and a number rather than name, which is why it hadn't triggered before, but in the context it was unmistakable. "Subject removed from regular treatment and approved for revised formula," he read aloud, "including increased sedative dosage to counteract stubborn mental resistance. Required to note that several of the staff protested the decision, citing past cases where separating designated pairs caused significant distress in both subjects. However, latest tech will be used to link casques, which should negate the effects of distance during the development phase."

"'Designated pairs'," Guy repeated. "That's the first time I've heard them actually refer to it specifically. Whatever is causing this, it was a deliberate attempt to do something. So there should be records of why they did it, somewhere."

"'Stubborn mental resistance'," Seifer repeated instead, sounding amused. He tossed his head back and laughed, loudly. "Fuckin' hell, I coulda told them that."

"What, that you're thick-skulled?" Squall muttered from the side. Seifer's amusement went a little sour, a little sharper-edged, but he didn't say anything, and didn't acknowledge Squall's comment at all.

"You gonna want to poke around down there anyway?" he asked shrewdly, and Vincent nodded. "Fine, I'll give you directions. No offense, but I don't think I wanna go back, myself."

"Could you help us hunt down some food supplies, then?" Guy asked. "We probably won't be sticking around here too long, so we should take what we can while we've got the chance."

Almasy shrugged. "Yeah, sure; could probably dig out a few stashes for you."

Vincent caught Roy's eye, and the two of them spent several moments memorizing the rough sketch and the directions that Almasy gave them. Leaving the others to their own tasks, the two of them set out to try and find a few more answers.

***

He'd been wondering if there would be a fight, but when they left to search the facility Squall came over and joined them without protest, though he didn't look too happy about it. Guy, quite wisely, just kept his mouth shut and held the door open a little longer.

He was a little surprised that _Seifer_ didn't have something to say about it, but maybe the man had some self-preservation instincts after all.

The mess hall with its associated kitchen and stores would have been the logical place to find food, but that very fact also made it the logical place for looters to go first. Guy wasn't terribly surprised when Seifer led them right through it, and across the compound to another building entirely. They searched through classroom cupboards, upper shelves of storerooms, and on one notable occasion beneath the floorboards in a lesser-used hallway. They found a few packets of rations, still sealed, which they scavenged, and plenty more that had split open and spoiled. By the time they'd been at it for maybe an hour, Guy was sweating and dusty and getting tired, and more than a little discouraged at their meagre pile of supplies.

Seifer kept walking, though, leading them down a long hallway from what must have been a grand atrium at one point. They had to forcefully pry open the hydraulic doors at the end of it, an act that would have been impossible for regular people-- and therefore looters, Guy thought hopefully-- but with four of them working at it, they managed to force a large enough gap to slip through.

And on the other side-- Guy stopped dead in his tracks, and stared.

Before he and Luke had ended up in those tanks, the leading scientists of their day had just created a prototype for a small, all-terrain land vehicle. The larger landships had been around for a while, the airships were in the advanced trial stages, but that new design-- it was big enough for two or three people, with large sturdy wheels instead of the massive treads that worked so well on the larger models but were completely impractical on the small scale. Guy had read all the newspapers, followed the development briefs, devoured all of the sketches; it was only a matter of time, they said, before the design would be perfected and production for public use could begin. And Guy had dreamed, someday, of having one of his own.

The creation sitting dusty but unharmed in the center of the garage bore just enough resemblance to those early designs to let him know what he was looking at. It was sleek and black, larger than the specs he'd read. The tires were low and wide, eight to a side; the front end was a single panel of what looked like glass but shone oddly in the light, like dark oil on water.

It was, in short, the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life.

He snapped out of only when Luke elbowed him none too gently in the side; he turned to find Luke regarding him with a look that was one small step short of outright laughter. Guy rolled his eyes, despite the feeling of his face going a bit warm. "Shut up," he muttered.

"Go on," Luke said, voice all but quivering. "I promise not to get jealous if you only make out with it a little."

"Shut _up_."

Helpless to resist, though, he went over to the vehicle as if magnetized when Luke gave him a little starting push. It took him a few minutes to find the door release, but only because it wasn't actually attached to the door itself but behind in a covered panel nearby. Inside, there were seats for nine, plus a driver; bare metal benches with the minimum of padding, not unexpected at all for a military transport. Guy gave the interior an obligatory once-over before going up and sliding into the driver's seat, stretching his fingers over the controls and imagining, seeing how it had evolved from those early sketches.

He was startled out of his thoughts when someone tossed a heavy, plastic disc onto the console in front of him. "Fire it up," Seifer said from behind him. "See if it'll run."

Guy stared at that disk, until eventually he made himself reach out with only slightly shaking fingers. When he slid the disk into the appropriate slot, it was almost automatic for his hands to move to the appropriate controls, shifting and pressing until the engine began to hum and the console came alive under his fingers. He had to remind himself to breathe more than once, though.

"Bit of a machine hound, are ya?" Seifer asked, though he didn't seem to expect a response since he just kept on talking. "We've got three full casks of fuel out there, you know. You think this thing is in good enough shape to get us where we're goin'?"

Guy frowned, awe fading into the background as he tried to focus on more practical concerns. The power had come on easily enough, which probably meant that nothing important was actually broken, but if he listened closely there was a sour note in the hum of the engines. Not much, not serious, maybe, but still-- "You got the specs to this thing around anywhere?" he asked.

"Manual's probably over in th' room where I found the key," Seifer answered. "If it's anywhere, anyway. C'mon."

They found what he was looking for in the bottom drawer of the musty little office stuck in the corner of the garage, and soon had the schematics all spread out in a wide arc around the nose of the vehicle, which was now gaping open with its access hatch propped up. Guy knew that he was probably muttering to himself as he looked from the plans to the actual machinery; was peripherally aware of the others moving around him, moving things, talking, but really only noticed them when he had to get up and go get some supplies from that back room.

Eventually he sat back, stretching out his shoulders. "Everything looks fine to me," he said to the room at large. "She's just been sitting for a while-- I'll have to oil things up, replace some of the fluids, but she should run fine." He shook his head admiringly. "They must've taken really good care of her, here."

"Yeah, well," Seifer said, "they were anal enough about everything else, that doesn't surprise me."

"How long do you think it'll take to fix everything up?" Luke asked, coming over to stand next to him, peering into the guts of the vehicle without having the faintest clue what he was looking at.

Guy shrugged. "A few hours?" he estimated. "I can keep on here while you go ahead with the rest of the search. That's if there's anywhere left to look?" He glanced at Seifer, but it was Luke who answered with a satisfied smile.

"No," he said, "but look." He gestured to the side, where a pair of crates were filled to nearly overflowing with the little foil-wrapped ration packages. "And--" he gestured to the side wall, where they'd apparently cleared piles of junk away from something fastened to the wall. "A working water filtration unit," he finished smugly.

Guy's eyebrows rose appreciatively. They'd been rationing their drinking water for what seemed like ever, not knowing whether the areas they traveled had clean supplies or not. It didn't matter for washing, or most of the cooking they did, but to drink they figured it was better to be safe, and it would definitely be nice to have a fresh supply.

"So," Luke went on, "we're going to go back and get our containers, and see what else we can hunt up to fill. But if you think this thing will really work, we'll just leave the rest of it here to load up when we leave."

"Sounds good," Guy said, already turning back to the beautiful tangle of machinery before him. He barely heard the others leave, when they went, too busy getting his hands covered in grease, humming quietly to himself as he worked.

***

The strained silence in the room was becoming rather uncomfortable. Roy and Vincent were still gone. Squall was sitting on his bunk, looking violently unapproachable, while Seifer wandered aimlessly around the room like a caged animal. They'd already filled as many water containers as they thought they could carry or ever possibly use, and even spent some time sorting through the creepy little room full of boxes that Squall had pointed him to, where he'd found some extra clothes that looked like they would fit. Luke had gone back down to the garage to leave a set for Guy, but since then-- he shifted in his seat, and made a show of looking at the maps because he didn't want to just sit there not saying anything.

After a few minutes, though, he felt the table rattle as Seifer thumped down into the other chair. "So," he said, "why are you okay bein' here by yourself when Guy's all the way across the compound?"

Luke blinked. "Hunh?"

Seifer frowned. "You an' him, you're the same as me an' the princess, right? You're a--what the hell was it, a 'designated pair', or whatever. Right?" He waited for Luke's reflexive nod before continuing. "So if I get antsy bein' out of eyeshot of him," he went on, indicating Squall with a broad wave of his hand, "how can you sit here an' be fine with Guy out there by himself?"

 _Because we're not fighting the connection tooth and nail_ , Luke thought but didn't say. Now that it had been brought to his attention, of course, he could feel the tug of _Guy_ , feel the first stirring of the worry that had made them both thoroughly irrational before they learned to deal with it-- but Luke took a deep breath, let it out and focused himself until the feeling faded again. He decided on a version of the truth. "We've had more time to get used to it," he answered. "You do learn how to deal with it; we pretty much had to if we wanted to be able to function. It would have driven us both nuts if we were stuck to each other like burrs all the time."

Not that he wasn't wishing he had stayed and let Guy talk mechanical nonsense at him, after all, because it probably would have been better than having this conversation. Seifer was still watching him intently, practically dissecting him with his eyes, and though Squall definitely wasn't looking their way Luke could feel the weight of his attention as well.

"Hunh," Seifer said, and turned his head to stare at Squall. The aura of tension around the other man racked up another few degrees.

"It's just," Luke finished weakly, "give it time."

With time, they'd either figure it out or kill each other. Luke figured it was pretty safe advice.

The door chose that moment to open again, abused hinges squealing lightly, and Luke glanced over gratefully to find Guy coming through it, a small streak of grease striped darkly across one cheekbone but otherwise cleanly dressed in his new clothes. "Hey," he said by way of greeting.

Luke smiled back at him. "Hey. How does it look?"

"Good-- really good, all things considered. Don't think we should have any problems getting to Esthar, at least, with the fuel we've got, assuming the numbers in the specs are even close to accurate. We'll have to see when we get there if we want to try and push all the way to Mideel, though. I suppose at worst, we'd just end up walking for a few days."

Guy's hand settled warm on the back of his neck, rubbing gently, and Luke sighed at the pressure. "Not like we haven't done that before," he said vaguely, eyes starting to drift closed.

"I was thinking, while I was down there," Guy murmured from very close by his ear. "After this we're going to be in close quarters for who knows how long. We should take advantage of the privacy while we can."

Since Luke had quite suddenly started thinking something similar, it wasn't hard to convince him. He did glance back uncertainly as they slipped out the door, though, seeing Seifer still sitting by himself at the table, staring now at the ceiling. Luke sighed. There was nothing he could do, he knew that, he knew they had to sort it out themselves, one way or another. But he still felt kind of badly for the two of them.

It was too bad that they really didn't seem to like each other at all. He supposed he was lucky that he'd been paired up with Guy, who at least had been his friend, before.

They found another room down the hall, pretty much identical to the one they'd just left but in much lesser repair-- most of the bunks were nothing but debris, none of them had mattresses. It had an intact door, though, which was all that mattered to them at that point, so they went in anyway. The moment the door closed behind them, Luke slid arms around Guy, fingers already working beneath his shirt while Guy's lips touched warm and wet up the line of his jaw.

They used the wall as support; they stripped each others' clothes off because it was so rare that they could, and skin against skin was so much more satisfying, with Guy warm and right there against him, just-- filling up all the needy places inside him that wanted to crawl inside Guy's skin and be close to him, all the time.

He saw Guy take the little vial of oil out of his pocket, set it carefully aside just in reach, and as always Luke had the moment of weirdness when he really thought about what that was for-- the moment where the part of him that was still Viscount Fabre said, usually in his brother's voice, _you're going to do what, now?_

But then Guy pressed forward, and the moment passed as it always did as Luke's mind started to shut out everything that wasn't Guy, Guy, _Guy_ \--

It was his turn, so he lifted his leg to hook over Guy's hip when Guy nudged it up, breathed in deep when Guy worked the first finger in and let it out on a groan when he found that spot right off. At first, he ran his hands over Guy, rubbing at his sensitive nipples to make him shiver, but after the second and third fingers it was all he could to cling to Guy's shoulders and keep his legs from buckling. When he couldn't take any more, he turned them until he could brace his hands against one of the larger pieces of bedframe; Guy didn't waste any time, but pressed up close to his back and pushed until the hot, hard length of him was seated in Luke's body as far as it would go. And then it was just a matter of hanging on, moving desperately back into Guy's thrusts, nearly growling in frustration when it almost but not quite went far enough to drive him over the edge.

Guy's rhythm went shuddering and erratic just before he stiffened-- and relaxed with a gust of breath on the back of Luke's neck. The whine that came from Luke's throat when Guy pulled out was one he would deny to his dying day, but then Guy tugged him around to face him, gave him a heavy-lidded smile and a deep, devouring kiss before sliding down in a sweat-slick press of skin to wrap his mouth around Luke's cock instead. Luke sank back until he was practically sitting on the broken bedframe, one hand in Guy's hair, eyes closed-- the force of his orgasm bent him nearly double, and he came back to himself with both arms cradling Guy's head in his lap, both of Guy's arms around his waist to brace him as he sank bonelessly to the ground.

And there they lay, Guy half on top of Luke, curled into his body, both of them with their eyes closed as their breathing slowly evened out. Guy eventually nipped his way up Luke's throat to his mouth, and they kissed long and slow before drawing reluctantly away. Luke slitted open his eyes to see Guy watching him from only inches away. "Better?" he asked quietly.

"Mm." After one last, light kiss, Guy pushed back and looked around, finally drawing over a scrap of what might have once been a bedsheet to clean them both off. Luke still felt kind of sticky as he pulled his clothes back on, but that wasn't such an unusual thing. And it was worth it for the warm relaxation in all of his limbs, for the quieting of that need for a while. For the way Guy stopped him just before they could leave the room and wrapped around him again, just hanging on, soaking up the last few moments of quiet they would have for probably quite some time.


	4. Chapter 4

Where it would have taken them a week or more to travel by train and then by foot, the sturdy little transport was going to get them to their destination in a matter of days. Which was good; it meant that Squall would have to spend less time in an enclosed space with Seifer, and he figured he wasn't the only one who would appreciate that.

Squall stretched his legs out as much as the seat in front of him allowed, crossed his arms and turned his head to stare out the view-slit at the countryside passing by. Despite everything, it was good to be moving again. It kind of felt like a training mission, actually-- the team piling into the transport, weapons secured in the overhead racks, waiting with a kind of tight anticipation for whatever lay at the end of the drive. And just being away from the Academy and that damned lab, wearing his own clothes and with a rare, clear sunlight coming down from the sky-- it was amazing how much that seemed to improve the situation.

"Hey, princess."

There was only so much it could do, of course.

He debated his options for a moment. The far more satisfying option would be to simply ignore Seifer. Unfortunately, Squall knew from past experience that the other man was a stubborn asshole and wasn't likely to let up until Squall _did_ answer, so the question was whether he was willing to put himself and his new companions, whose good opinion he was still a little dependent on, through that pain. In the end he grimaced inwardly and turned his head just enough to indicate he was listening.

"Just like old times, hunh?" Seifer went on with a tight little grin, his eyes bright, echoing Squall's own thoughts with disconcerting accuracy. Seifer was lounging in his seat, arms hooked over the back, and with that familiar coat and the posture and everything else it really was like they'd ended up back in the past. Their choice of weapons had landed them on the same training missions more often than not, which was ironic since they'd each only chosen the gunblade to spite the other. Quistis had called it a pissing contest. Neither of them had ever denied it. "Wonder if you'll manage to land yourself in the infirmary after this one, too?"

Squall twisted a bit further in his seat so that he could glare properly. "Not unless you're planning on hitting me from behind while we're supposed to be doing something else. Again." How the hell had he ended up with the seat in front of Seifer, anyway? He knew for a fact the man hadn't been there when he sat down. He'd made sure of it.

"Hey, I was just tryin' to improve your reflexes. Help you learn to expect the unexpected." That grin was a challenge, plain as day, and Squall itched for the opportunity to take it. If only they weren't going to be stuck in this transport for the next two days--

***

"So," Luke said too loudly, feeling a little desperate as he looked between Squall and Seifer. Guy was driving, and therefore lost in his own blissful, tech-induced haze; Vincent was still absorbed in sorting through whatever files he had managed to dig up. Roy looked like he was _sleeping_ , the bastard. So it was left to Luke to defuse the imminent explosion he could see building between their two newest recruits. "You two were in the Academy together, I guess?"

Seifer settled back in his seat, hands going behind his head, his eyes still fixed on Squall. "Same class," he confirmed.

"So, uh," Luke said again. "What was it like?" He was a little curious about that, actually-- the idea of it was just so different from what he had known.

"Boring, mostly," Seifer said with a shrug. He flicked his eyes over to Luke only briefly, then went back to staring a hole in the back of Squall's head. "Just like any other school, probably, only with more hittin' stuff."

Luke thought back to his own hazy memories of childhood-- the long line of private tutors, the sword lessons with the Commandant of the Knights of the Order, all held in the comfort and luxury of his own private courtyard. He thought of the barracks rooms they'd seen with their rows upon rows of narrow beds, then thought of his long-gone suite of rooms at his family's manor. "Yeah, but," he pushed on weakly, "what was it _like_?"

And _that_ made Seifer actually look at him, only to his dismay it was in clear irritation. "What, you want me to read off a lesson plan, or some shit? It was a pain in the ass, and a waste of time, and why the fuck do you want to know, anyway? You too stupid to go to school, yourself?"

"No," Luke automatically replied, stung, and he knew he should just shut up but his mouth was already moving. "My parents had tutors brought in for us."

"Oh," Seifer drawled, suddenly too calm. "Little rich boy, were you? Yeah, we had one or two like you come to the Academy, think they could hack it in the real world. They usually ended up pissing themselves and callin' their mommies to come get 'em inside a week. So fuck off with the questions, all right, and just leave it at that." He stood, without another word, and moved forward until he vanished through the hatch leading to the driver's area.

Luke was left staring after him, bewildered and a little hurt. Which was stupid, really, because he barely knew the guy, but he'd seemed-- not precisely friendly, especially not when anything to do with Squall was concerned, but at least approachable. He'd seemed willing to work with them and play nice with the rest of the group. But that didn't necessarily mean he wanted to be _friends_ or anything, Luke reminded himself sternly.

"He's an asshole," Squall's voice said quietly, unexpectedly. "Don't take it personally. And the Academy probably wasn't that much different from what you knew, it just-- had more people."

Luke turned his head to blink at Squall, who was still sitting staring out the window with his arms folded firmly across his chest. "Oh," Luke said hesitantly. "Thanks?"

Squall shrugged one shoulder, dismissive, and said nothing more. Feeling even more confused, Luke blinked again. Then, deciding to follow Roy's example, he leaned back in his seat and determinedly closed his eyes.

***

Their arrival in Mideel would have been a great deal easier if they hadn't actually run out of fuel just a short distance away. They probably would have made it were it not for a few unexpected detours along the way-- rough terrain, an unfordable river; not impossible barriers but ones that took valuable time to go around.

Not that it wasn't a bad idea to abandon their transport before getting close to populated areas, anyway, because it hadn't been so long that people wouldn't remember SEED, and there was a good chance they wouldn't remember them well. Showing up in an obvious military transport probably wasn't the best of plans.

Still, the delay of finding a place to shelter and camouflage the transport, sorting through their gear for what was portable and then walking the rest of the distance meant that they arrived well after sunset, tired and hungry and sore from so much movement after sitting for several days. Or, Squall mused darkly, after several decades lying in a tank. Either way.

There had been some debate, beforehand-- whether it would be better to find somewhere to spend the night and wait to locate the lab until morning, or go searching first and simply bunk down there when they found it. Each option had its advantages and disadvantages.

In the end, the decision was made for them.

The town of Mideel, from what Squall remembered, had been advertised as a vacation spot-- hot springs, beaches and the like. Whatever it had been all those years before, though, it obviously wasn't anymore. The center of the town was a sunken hole many blocks wide, surrounded by the skeletons of buildings and broken stone. It didn't look like an explosion, Squall thought critically, eyeing what he could see of the remaining structures-- the walls that were left were tipping _in_ , not out, so it was more likely that the land had just given way for some reason. It did happen, around underground rivers or the like, but the few instances he'd seen had just been sinkholes a man's height across, at most. He'd never seen one so large.

It figured, of course, that the address of the building they were looking for was right in the middle of it.

"Excuse me," he heard Guy say, and looked to see him holding out a hand to catch the attention of someone walking by. "What happened here?"

"Earthquake," the man replied shortly, already moving on. "Go ask at the hospital if you're looking for someone who was in it, they've got all the records there." The man pointed to the distinctive outline of a cross on a lighted sign not far away.

Late as it was, the outer door was unlocked. Squall wasn't entirely surprised-- Dr. Kadowaki at the Academy had always kept the infirmary door open as well, and either she herself or one of her assistants were always inside. They had maintained that the ill or injured should be able to obtain help when they needed it, no matter the hour-- Squall himself had made use of the facility several times outside of official hours, usually at least partially because of Seifer. It seemed that the doctors in Mideel held similar opinions.

A man inside looked up as they entered, eyes moving automatically to scan them for sign of injury, then looking up in vague puzzlement as he obviously found none. He was dressed in the ubiquitous white coat of the medical profession. "Can I help you?" he asked politely.

"I hope so," Guy said with a smile. He was typically their front man for the public-- he was engaging, charming enough that people wanted to trust him. Which automatically made him a better choice than Vincent, who barely spoke when he could glower, or Roy, who could put on the act but more often came across as arrogant. Luke, while just as engaging as Guy, seemed to have more of a tendency to say exactly the wrong thing-- as evidenced by his disastrous attempts at conversation in the transport, though some of that was just Seifer being Seifer.

Squall was rather glad they'd already worked out the group dynamics amongst themselves, without needing either of them to step in and fill the place. Squall himself certainly had no inclination to talk. And while Seifer could charm people when he wanted something out of them, he was as likely to get in trouble as get the intended results. And quite frankly, neither of them really understood enough about what was going on in the world, yet, to be able to be able to talk to the people in it. He was definitely grateful that the others weren't stupid enough to put them in that position.

"We're visiting the area, looking for some people," Guy was saying. "We didn't know there had been an earthquake, though, and we're not sure if they were caught in it. Do you have records here?"

"Yes, of course," the doctor said sympathetically. He went to a cabinet near the front desk and released the latch. "What are the names?"

"Ah," Guy said, hesitating, glancing quickly at the others, "we're not actually sure. We're just following up on word-of-mouth, actually; the people we're looking for were staying at a facility--"

The doctor's face went tight and closed all of a sudden, and his voice was cold when he spoke next. "If you are referring to that laboratory," he said, bluntly, "then you might as well say so."

"What do you know about it?" Vincent said narrowly, stepping forward minutely. The doctor, to his credit, didn't step back at the implied threat; he tipped his chin up and answered evenly.

"I was one of the people that found the remains of it in one of the downed buildings," he said plainly. "It had been hidden behind solid walls, with no doors or windows, which is why I'm curious as to how you knew of it."

"Were there any survivors?" Luke asked urgently, stepping forward, and the doctor's face closed off even further.

"That depends," he said in clipped tones, "on why you want to know."

"We--" Luke started.

"You think we were involved with it somehow," Roy cut in flatly.

At the doctor's raised eyebrow, Luke blinked a few times-- then started to laugh. "Seriously?" he said. "Oh, man. No, look," he went on earnestly, still smiling in a lopsided kind of way. "The lab you found here isn't the only one there is. We've been going to all of them, trying to figure out why they were built and what they were for. We're just trying to follow the trail, here."

"If you did find anyone in that place," Guy added more quietly, "we might be the best ones to help them."

It was probably revealing too much, Squall thought with a frown, especially since they didn't know anything about this man. He could have been lying. Could have been working with the ones who'd started it all. But Guy's words made the doctor pause, and a few seconds later his eyes went wide and startled in realization. "You were--?"

Luke grimaced; Guy nodded.

"And you came out of it without any side effects?"

Squall couldn't stop himself from glancing at Seifer, jerking his eyes away when he found the other man looking back at him. He saw Guy hesitate, as if wondering how to phrase something. "Nothing serious," he eventually said. "Nothing that we can't deal with."

The doctor blinked at them several more times, then his rigid posture sagged on a gusty sigh. Squall thought he looked a little relieved, which wasn't unreasonable considering he had been facing down six armed men on his own. "Well," he said, "I suppose that changes things. Come with me." He flicked one last searching glance over them, then shrugged minutely and gestured them all back through a swinging door.

"We didn't even know it was there until the earthquake," the doctor said quietly as he led them through the facility. Squall was able to pick out which wards had patients in them by the way his steps quieted as he walked by. "When the walls cracked, it opened up these hallways, full of-- well. I expect you know."

Squall nearly shivered before catching himself. Luke didn't seem to bother trying. "Yeah, we know."

"There must have been at least thirty people in there, all dead," the doctor went on gravely. "Sealed up in these capsules like-- like specimens. It's shameful, something like that going on right in our community, and we knew nothing about it for so long."

He pushed open a door at the end of one hall, revealing a smaller room with only a single bed and a desk. The room's occupant wasn't in the bed, however, but slumped in the chair next to it, staring at nothing, occasionally blinking but making no other sign of life save the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

"We found him at the edge of it," the doctor said softly. "Him and-- well." The doctor shook his head sadly. "There was a second boy with him, who obviously got them both out before the walls came tumbling in around their ears, but he didn't make it. His injuries-- he'd obviously been hit by a significant amount of debris, it's amazing he was able to keep moving as long as he did. We found this one lying next to him," he went on, indicating the catatonic figure with a tip of his chin. "Wouldn't speak or acknowledge us in any way, but he wouldn't let go of the other boy's hand."

Squall saw Luke take a step closer to Guy, saw Guy's hand twitch out as if to reach. Squall himself couldn't have turned to look at Seifer if he'd actually wanted to, because he was too fixed on that unmoving figure in the chair, feeling cold again all the way to his core. Because if _that_ was what happened when one half of a so-called pair died, then--

Vincent, apparently unbothered, took a few steps forward and leaned down to peer into the patient's face. "How long ago was the earthquake?"

"Not quite two months," the doctor answered after a moment's thought.

"And he's been like this ever since? Do you know for certain that he was inside one of the capsules?"

"Yes," the doctor said, walking over to join Vincent. "There were two that had obviously been broken open recently; the others were either closed and empty, or-- closed and not empty. We're certain that--" And then he broke off with a gasp, staring down at his patient.

"What?" Luke said worriedly, stepping forward, and then his eyes widened as well. "Whoa. That's-- kinda creepy."

Curious, Squall looked and found the patient's eyes not staring into space anymore, but fixed firmly on Vincent.

Slowly, the patient's head turned, tipping rustily up until he was facing Vincent. His eyes blinked, squinted; his lips parted on a rusty whisper.

"Zack?"

***

He'd been lost in the dark. Couldn't find the way out, and he'd been cold so long-- Zack had said he'd get them warm again, but Zack was--

 _Come on, Cloud. A little further-- that's it. See, not so hard._

And the world had been shaking, at that point, but Zack had held him steady. Just like always.

The blurry face, crowned with long black hair-- it had been a beacon, cutting through the darkness. Making that darkness break up, fade away until everything seemed sharp-edged and too close. "Zack?" he'd called. Or tried. His throat had been tight and dry.

He had blinked up, trying to bring the world back into focus. Wondering why Zack was so quiet, because Zack was _never_ quiet-- and as he blinked, a stranger's face resolved. The disappointment nearly crushed him, making him remember exactly why he'd let himself stay in the dark so long. And he couldn't find it again to go back, and there were too many people around him--

Cloud swallowed hard against the memory of panic, and lifted his mug in hands that only shook a little. The tea was warm, tasting pleasantly of some faint spice, but he still felt cold inside; he wasn't sure he'd ever feel warm again, they way the chill had seeped into his bones. The others, these new people who said they were like him-- he'd listened to their stories, their explanations. But he honestly wasn't sure why it was important. He knew he'd been part of an experiment-- he remembered the head scientist's face when they put him _in_ the tank, after all, remembered the thick green choking oblivion of mako creeping over his head. And what did it matter if he and Zack had been linked somehow? They'd already been together, before any of this happened, no kind of link was going to change anything between them. And Zack was--

Cloud closed his eyes.

Zack was dead.

And he was just so damned tired.

 _Hey,_ a voice whispered to him. _Looks like this is as far as I go. But you keep going, you hear me? For both of us. Don't you dare give up, Cloud. I'm counting on you._

Cloud sighed, opened his eyes, and focused on the face across the table-- the blond, the one who'd been doing most of the talking. The redhead was hovering near him in a way that made Cloud's chest go tight; both of them were looking at Cloud himself in obvious concern. "So," he made himself say, "what do you want from me?"

The question seemed to startle them. Or maybe it was his voice-- it sounded flat even to his own ears, and if Zack ever heard him talking like that, he'd--

 _Fuck._

He lifted the mug again and just held it near his face, feeling the steam on his skin. Why had they come, anyway? He'd been fine as he was, he hadn't been able to feel any of this, and that was _fine_. Instead he was awake, and he couldn't go back to sleep because Zack didn't want him to, which meant he was stuck no matter how much it hurt.

"You're free to do as you like," the blond said carefully. "If you don't want to come with us, that's fine, but you're welcome to."

"We can use all the help we can get," the redhead added, more to himself than to Cloud, which earned him an elbow in the ribs and a narrow-eyed look.

 _What do you want to do when we get out of here, Cloud? I think we'd make great mercenaries. Travel the world, fight bad guys, help people and get paid for it. They're starting a program for that, you know, up north. Like a school. We should go and make a name for ourselves._

"What will you be doing?" he asked reluctantly.

"Mostly searching for information on what was done to us, and why. Looking for others like us, helping anyone still trapped. Eventually, maybe, trying to track down whoever was behind it all, assuming there's anyone left."

Cloud looked up at that. "And if you find them," he asked, "what do you intend to do?"

The blond blinked, looking like maybe he hadn't thought that far. It was the bigger one, standing behind him, that cracked his knuckles with a wide, anticipatory grin. "Fuck 'em up," he said. "That's my plan, anyway."

The smaller blond winced; the redhead looked a little shamefaced but Cloud noted that he didn't disagree. The other three were all stone-faced, but he thought there was something kind of predatory in not-Zack's eyes, at least.

 _You do what you've got to do, Cloud. But you don't give up._

Cloud nodded, slowly. "I'll go with you."

***

The doctor-- Rockbell, he'd introduced himself-- blinked at them uncertainly. "I'm sorry," he said, "but the laboratory itself is gone. One of the aftershocks collapsed that entire area. There's nothing left."

"Of course not," Roy murmured, turning away. He went to the window, crossing his arms and looking out over the streets below.

"Okay, well, is there anything you can tell us about what's happened to the world in the last, say, fifty years or so?" Guy said. "Some of us have been, ah, out of circulation for quite a while, and we don't really know why this experiment we were in was abandoned."

Hearing it stated out loud like that to an outsider made Roy's shoulderblades itch, just on principle. Though he supposed that the good doctor had cared for Cloud and seemed righteously angry over the entire thing, so it was likely safe to discuss the matter with him. And being a doctor, there was always the chance he might actually be of use.

"I don't know that I can tell you much," Doctor Rockbell said, regretfully. "Mideel is quite isolated; anything that happened in the cities up north wouldn't have touched us here."

"Anything at all would still be a big help," Guy encouraged. The doctor sat back in his chair and frowned in thought.

"My father told me that we used to have more visitors, when he was a boy. I suppose it would have been about fourty years ago that they stopped coming. A few, still, here and there, but nothing like it was. The town declined, of course, over the years; to be honest, the earthquake wasn't as much of a disaster for us as it might have been in the past." He shrugged helplessly. "As for the reason, my father never really talked about it, just said that it was city business and better off left there."

"There must have been newspapers, though," Roy broke in. "Some sort of record of current events. You can't have been completely cut off from the rest of the world."

Rockbell gave him a narrow look. "As I said, it was a long time ago. The news we get here is second- or third-hand at best, these days, and has been like that for as long as I can remember. And any kind of archive we had was lost in the earthquake. I'm sorry," he said firmly, "but I don't think I can help you with what you want."

"You've already been a big help," Guy said firmly. "One last question, though: I don't suppose you know where we might be able to get some fuel?"

Roy shook his head and turned away, leaving the conversation behind.

The rest of their party, including its newest member, was already outside, squinting into the late-morning glare and pulling themselves together to depart. Cloud had disappeared for a while, after agreeing to join them, returning dressed entirely in black and with a massive broadsword harnessed to his back. It looked modified somehow for energy discharge but also had a wicked edge, and the weight of it alone would make it formidable. After eyeing the tight, possessive way he gripped the handle, no one asked him where he'd found the equipment; Roy wasn't sure he wanted to know.

For all that the stop wasn't a complete failure, it was still a rather disappointed-- and unsettled-- group that turned their refueled transport towards the Archadian border. Disappointed, because that had been the last stop on their list, their last chance to find some key piece of information to explain things. They could hope that the other teams had fared better, of course, but it was hard to be optimistic after searching so far with so little to show for it.

Unsettled, because there was Cloud sitting silent and motionless in the transport with them, acting as a living reminder of what could happen. He obviously made certain members of their party nervous: Luke had been in the front with Guy ever since they set out, even though he clearly did not share his partner's obsession with tech. Seifer was sitting behind Squall with one arm dangled over the back of Squall's seat-- and, most tellingly, Squall was not protesting despite a certain lingering sourness to his expression.

Roy couldn't really fault them. The idea of being bound so tightly to another person, to be so dependent on them and they on you, without having had any choice in the matter-- Roy was actually quite grateful that he had been spared.

Though that did beg the question of _why_. The others might not have been willing to think about the matter, and Vincent was too obsessed with his files to consider the more tangible clue that had been dumped in their lap, but Roy felt no such limitations. He frowned thoughtfully before smoothing his expression back out into the semblance of sleep, letting himself loll in his seat as the transport jounced and rumbled onward. Seifer and Squall were holding a distinctly one-sided conversation across the aisle, but he let it roll past him as white noise.

There were a few things that Roy felt comfortable accepting as fact, for all that they didn't necessarily have the evidence to back it up as yet. Firstly, they had all been intended to have a partner. All of the available evidence suggested that, as did his own instinct. Secondly, therefore, whomever had been intended for him had not survived the laboratory.

Why, then, was he not in the same state as Cloud?

He thought back, reluctantly, to the succession of empty hallways he'd seen, rows upon rows of dead, dark tanks. And he had to wonder, on a purely objective level, what the chances were that among so many corpses, both members of a pair would survive. Admittedly, their odds to that point were a little incredible-- four confirmed pairings out of fourteen known survivors, not even counting Cloud's odd case, given how many didn't survive at all? There had to be some other factor at work there, some kind of mutual encouragement for survival.

But no scientist worth their title would count out the possibility of failure. They must have considered that their experiment would have had casualties, so they would hardly have designed a program where one death automatically meant two.

After sorting through the possibilities, Roy could only speculate that the initial moment of connection was the key. He'd witnessed that moment for three pairs now, to his everlasting dismay, and he had to admit that that first time coming together seemed to have the power of overwhelming compulsion. What could he conclude, then? If one half of a pair died before leaving the tank, there was no noticeable effect. He himself was proof enough of that. If both survived, they were drawn to each other and compelled to-- set the link, so to speak.

If, in Cloud's case, he had made that connection in the escape from the lab, before his partner died, that could explain his current state. Roy considered that theory-- and spared a moment of morbid curiousity to wonder if Cloud and his Zack had been forced to waste precious time during their escape by having sex.

Roy thought back again to the hazy moments when he had first awakened, and found himself very grateful that he hadn't given in to the brief, macabre urge to open up the hatch next to his. Partly because he had a rather strong suspicion of who would have been inside it, and Hughes wouldn't have wanted to be remembered like that. But more than that-- he couldn't know whether this bond, whatever it was, would trigger if one half of it were already dead. But the saying was _better safe than sorry_ for a reason, and at the very least, he thought grimly, it was better to be overly-cautious than irreversibly emotionally bound to a corpse.


	5. Chapter 5

Choral Castle, once the summer seat of the ruling family of the Kingdom of Kimlasca, had been a sprawling stone complex on the cliffs overlooking the eastern sea, connected by the nearby port to the rest of the kingdom. Its position on the cliffs was unchanged, but the port had long since been closed in favour of larger ones to the north, and the castle itself had seen many years since it had been kept in any kind of repair.

Luke let his eyes trace the walls, filling in the gaps where stones had fallen away, remembering. He turned to look a bit wistfully northward, towards the lands that had once been Kimlasca, wondering if the rest of the places he remembered were just as changed-- he hadn't been able to go back and see them for himself, because even after so long the people still looked a little strangely at people with red hair. They'd entered one small village shortly after Luke and Guy had first awakened, and been stared at the entire time. After that, it had been decided that one of the other teams would search the lands in and around Luke's former home, while Luke himself ranged further afield.

Still, Luke thought wistfully, he had to be allowed a little homesickness. Even if it was for a home that wasn't really there anymore-- he, at least, still remembered it.

A flash of movement drew his attention, reminding him why he was on watch in the first place. He focused, and when the next movement caught his eye he followed it to the source, spotting several human-shaped figures just starting out of the trees towards the castle's crumbling outer walls. Four of them, Luke decided, squinting, which didn't really narrow it down any-- they'd been two parties of four and one of three when they first separated, but anything could have happened since then.

He flashed the signal from the walls and saw the approaching group hesitate. One of them raised an arm in recognition, and Luke nodded in satisfaction before heading down from the walls to let the others know they were expecting company.

The echoes off the stone meant that they could hear voices long before any of the approaching party came into view. That was one of the main reasons they'd settled their camp in the castle's entry hall, that ability to hear potential enemies coming before it was too late. Luckily, the hall was also in better shape than many of the castle's other large rooms, being shored up on all sides by exterior walls, and had the benefit of a massive central fireplace, a necessity as they moved further north and the nights grew steadily colder.

And there were enough little antechambers coming off the side hallways that they could each occasionally have some privacy if they wanted it. Which, given that there were now at least four pairs among them, was probably going to be a very good thing for everyone involved.

Auron was the first to duck through the half-fallen doorway, eyes doing a sweep of the entire room before he even finished crossing the threshold. Unsurprisingly, he just nodded a wordless greeting before taking himself off to the side and settling against a wall, his expression barely visible behind the collar of his coat.

The next two arrivals came in together, talking easily between themselves, which was also not surprising. They occasionally tossed a comment over their shoulders to an unfamiliar fourth man who hesitated in the doorway, looking around kind of uncertainly before moving any further. The others showed no such hesitation, coming right inside and calling out their greetings.

"You guys made good time," Flynn commented as he set down his pack. Yuri followed suit with considerably less grace, and he muttered a curse as he arched his back and rolled his shoulders. "I was sure we'd get here first."

Luke pointed back outside, to one of the outbuildings that had been transformed into a temporary garage. Hopefully only temporary, anyway-- he teased Guy about it, sure, but the vehicle really was damned useful to have, when so many other forms of transportation had either been shut down or put under restrictive control. He hoped they wouldn't have to abandon it completely. "Found a transport," he answered.

Yuri shot him a knowing grin. "Bet Guy was happy about that."

Luke groaned. "You have no idea," he said, then grunted as Guy dug an elbow into his side. "Well, you were," he protested, and Guy rolled his eyes though he might have been blushing a tiny bit.

Luke glanced curiously at the new guy to find the new guy looking very intently back at him-- not hostile, Luke thought, though the thick scar over his eye did give a certain fierce air. None of the others seemed in any hurry to make introductions, so Luke just gave the guy an eyebrow and waited until he came over.

"I don't mean to stare," the man said in a faintly rasping voice, once he was close enough. "It's just that if I were to believe my grandfather's stories, I'd think I should be bowing to you."

The hair again, Luke realized, and looked at the man in new interest. "You're from Kimlasca?" he asked, and received a nod in reply.

"It was the Protectorate of Landis by the time I was born, but it was part of the Kingdom of Kimlasca before that. Of course, now it's all Archades." Both of them grimaced, then smiled at each other when they noticed. The man shook his head and held out his hand. "Basch fon Ronsenberg."

Luke shook the proffered hand warmly. "I remember the Ronsenbergs," he said, and he did-- good people, all of them, long-time friends of the crown. "I might have known your grandfather, actually. And wow, is that ever a strange thing to say to someone," he added, looking at Basch and guessing that the man was, physically, a good ten years older than him, even if he'd been born years later. "Luke fon Fabre," he introduced himself, and saw Basch's eyes go wide.

"Then you're actually--"

Luke nodded with a half-awkward shrug. "Yeah, well. I wasn't king or anything; that was going to be my brother's job. Before Archades." A question occurred to him, and he asked it before he could start to wonder if he actually wanted to know the answer. "I don't suppose you know what happened to-- what happened after Archades took over?"

"No," Basch said regretfully. "But I was not the best of students to anyone but my weapons master, I'm afraid."

Luke laughed. "Yeah, I was pretty much the same. Don't worry about it," he added, shoving aside the mingled disappointment and relief. He turned to Guy instead, who had been looking on with some interest. "Basch, this is Guy," he introduced, then quickly went around the rest of the circle, making sure to point out their three new recruits. Yuri gave a quick, negligent wave in thanks; Flynn at least managed to look a little bit sorry at his lapse in courtesy, and made an effort to greet Squall, Seifer and Cloud in return.

A scrape of sound from outside had them all immediately on alert, a tense stillness gripping the room. Luke winced, remembering the watch post he was technically still supposed to be at. He made his way over to the doorway instead, pulling himself silently up to the ledge above it to peer out the archer's slit. He felt more than saw Guy settle in at his side; he knew that the others were making similar preparations, finding cover, readying weapons.

Paranoia, probably, Luke reflected sourly. It was probably just some wild animal, or the wind or something, since Auron at least was cautious enough to make sure his group hadn't been followed. Still, given everything that had happened to them, they were probably allowed a little paranoia. They didn't know who or what might still be after them, after all.

Luke all but held his breath as a shadow flickered on the ground, just out of view-- something scraped again, a distinct footstep on stone. His hand moved on the hilt of his new sword, tightening and releasing, feeling the faint give of the leather on the hilt. Guy was a tense coil of muscle beside him, a tight little knot of anticipation in the back of his head.

The shadows shifted again-- and Luke blinked as they gave way to the form of a man with thinning grey hair, clutching a staff. "Come out!" the old man shouted as he approached. "I know you're here. You can't trespass here, this is crown property."

Luke gaped through a long moment of shock-- then nearly laughed out loud as the tension flooded out of him again in the wake of adrenaline. Of all the situations he had imagined-- and he'd imagined a lot of things, during some long nights near the beginning-- _this_ was definitely not one of them.

Between one blink and the next, Vincent was outside with the old man, one hand wrapping around the staff and easily pulling it away. And that, as far as Luke was concerned, was that. They'd send the guy on his way with some sort of reassurance, and no one would get hurt. Simple.

The old man flinched as his weapon was taken-- but then, far from what Luke had expected, he spun away and left the staff behind without hesitation, drawing a short sword from under his coat. He moved like a swordsman, Luke realized with a sinking sensation, and a very competent one at that, despite the stooped shoulders and gnarled hands.

Things were suddenly a lot more complicated. Because while one man, no matter how skilled, was not going to be much of a threat against all of them, the prospect of subduing him harmlessly didn't seem so much like an option anymore. And Luke really didn't want to have to kill him. Even setting aside the logical argument that they were going to have to stay put for a while yet and therefore having search parties come looking for a missing man would be problematic-- the idea of killing an completely innocent old man made him feel a bit sick to his stomach.

"Look," he shouted through the slit. "We're not here to hurt anyone or cause any trouble. We just need somewhere to stay for a few days."

The old man's head jerked briefly towards the sound of his voice, but his eyes never left Vincent, the only visible foe. "You can't," he said firmly. "This is no place for vagabonds. Now leave here before I go fetch the Judges."

"Come on, old timer," Yuri drawled, stepping out of his own hiding place. "What do you think we're going to do, break the castle? Look around, it's already broken."

The old man went thin-lipped with what looked like anger, and took a visibly tighter grip on his sword while he shifted stance. Sensing that things were going to get messy, Luke jumped down and slipped through the door, wanting to be ready-- in whatever way was necessary.

The old man's sharp eyes tracked the sound, as before, leaving him looking right at the doorway when Luke walked through it. And as Luke stepped out into clear view, the old man stopped still, going pale as his sword dipped and nearly fell. The damned hair, Luke thought resignedly-- he was going get a _hat_ the next town they went through, because the whole thing was getting a little ridiculous. It had been a symbol of the royal house once, sure, but it had been a really long time since that mattered at all.

Though the old man's reaction did seem a little extreme-- shock and hope and disbelief instead of the more distant curiousity he'd seen before. He did recover after a few seconds, though he still looked a bit shaken. "You are trespassing on private property," he started over, voice firming the more he spoke. "You need to leave."

 _Crown property_ , Luke remembered, and he took a breath to brace himself before stepping forward, taking a chance. "Yeah, well, this happens to be my private property, so I don't think we have to go anywhere."

The old man flinched, but rallied with impressive speed. "That," he said sharply, "is impossible."

"Afraid not. I'm Luke fon Fabre," he said, tipping his chin up in a well-remembered arrogance, "and this land once belonged to my family. Still does, from what you're saying."

"The last of the Fabre line died more than two centuries ago," the old man said. But he was starting to sound uncertain, like he wasn't really so sure of that anymore.

Luke sighed as he put away his weapon. "Look," he said, feeling tired. "Just come in here for a minute, let us explain, and-- and if you still want us to leave after that, we will," he promised, ignoring the dirty looks he just knew he was getting for the words. He was pretty sure he wouldn't have to make good on it. Pretty sure. "You have my word," he added.

It had seemed a reasonably safe gamble. Luke still felt his shoulders slump in relief when the old man, after a long moment of hesitation, put his sword away and nodded, once.

It was hard to explain it all to someone who hadn't seen it from the inside, especially since there were still so many things missing from their own knowledge. It was hard to find the right words to make someone who hadn't lived it believe such an incredible story. But with Guy's help and a little input from the others-- _very_ little, they were maybe still a little miffed at him for earlier-- Luke managed to spell out enough of it that the old man seemed like he was starting to believe them. If nothing else, the demonstration of their enhanced strength gave him reason for that much. He looked at Luke in a kind of bewildered wonder, now, with only a touch of suspicion.

"Pere," he introduced himself at last, and both Luke and Guy started. "My family have been caretakers of the Kimlascan royal lands for--"

"A very long time," Guy finished. "I knew a Pere, once," he added. "He was my sword instructor when I was a child. He came with me from Malkuth when I made the decision to stay in Kimlasca, with Luke."

"You are-- House Gardios?" Pere drew a very shaky breath at Guy's affirmative nod, rubbing a hand over his face. "I am meeting legends," he remarked to the empty air. "And I thought today would be dull."

 _Now_ he believed them, Luke thought wryly. They should have had Guy doing the talking from the start, and saved themselves the trouble.

Pere shook his head sharply, and recovered his poise on a long, deep breath. "As I said," he went on steadily, "I am the caretaker of this property, for what good it does in these times. I do what I can, though without any funds or manpower to do repairs, mostly I just chase out the animals, keep the undergrowth cut back. Some months back I noticed signs of what I thought might have been vandals, which is why I've been keeping a closer eye on it lately."

"Yeah, that would have been us, too," Guy said. "We needed somewhere to stay for a while."

Pere nodded. "I would bring you to my own house, but a group this size would draw attention, and I somehow think you wouldn't appreciate that," he said shrewdly. "But I will see that you have food and supplies. And of course you may stay for as long as you need."

"Thank you," Luke said sincerely.

That seemed to be the end of things, as far as everyone else was concerned. Vincent returned to his datascreen, bending heads with Auron while they compiled their information. Yuri and Flynn disappeared together down one of the side halls, while Squall began yet another round of maintenance on his gunblade and Seifer leaned back in every appearance of taking a nap.

Luke still lowered his voice instinctively when he stepped in a bit closer to Pere. Not that he was trying to _hide_ anything, of course, but it still felt a bit-- private. "I was wondering," he asked hesitantly, "could you tell me about what happened, after the battle with Archades? I mean, you seem to know your history, so--" He shrugged, feeling awkward.

"There is a lot," the old man answered slowly, watching Luke closely. "I'm not sure where to start. What do you want to know, specifically?"

Luke drew a breath, hesitated-- Guy, leaning against the nearby wall, nodded encouragingly. "Last I remember, we'd been pushed back to the fortress at Kaitzur," Luke began. "We'd just got reinforcement from Baticul, and support from Malkuth, but we were still pinned down. That was late summer."

They'd been fighting for months by then, endlessly, struggling to push back wave after wave of soldiers led by the faceless Judges of the Archadian command. The heat of the sun had made the bodies stink on the field. He remembered standing on the walls of Kaitzur, looking out over the carrion birds and the broken flags, and thinking that it was only a matter of time before they fell, and even the steady presence of Guy at his shoulder couldn't ease the hopeless weight that had come over him then.

"That would have been near the end, then," Pere said, confirming Luke's own suspicions.

"I remember the fighting, mostly," he went on after a moment, "but after a point it's all blank. I know that Father died in that battle, I heard that from-- uh, from another friend who's not here yet."

Pere nodded solemnly. "He did. That was the turning point, really; with the king gone, much of the border defence fell apart. The heir to the throne-- your brother-- was very publicly captured and taken away to the capital of Archades as a hostage. If the histories are accurate, he was absorbed into their military. He never had any children, so that was thought to be the end of royal line.

"You," he went on, "simply vanished during the battle-- you were presumed dead, though it would seem you were simply captured in secret. And with nothing left of the royal family, that was the end of it. The Archadians put someone in charge of the city, declared us a Protectorate of the Empire, and for the most part withdrew."

"Smart of them," Guy said grudgingly. "It's hard to hate a conqueror if they haven't visibly conquered anything. I'll bet a lot of people were so relieved that the fighting was over and that they got to go back to their homes and lives-- they wouldn't have cared if they were called Kimlascan or Archadian by that point. Archades keeps Asch as its visible hostage, while disposing of the potential figurehead to head off any future rebellion." He nodded to Luke pointedly.

It did make sense. Luke felt a little bit ill admitting it. "And hey," he added sourly, "while they're at it, why waste two veteran fighters when they had this brand-new scientific program to test? They must have grabbed you when they did me." Guy hadn't been more than five paces from his side for the entire battle, and for all the skirmishes and rallies before that. It was a pretty safe assumption to make.

He knew that he should make sure, should see if Pere had any other information that might be useful, but at that moment Luke felt like he'd heard enough. Felt like he'd heard more than enough, actually; felt kind of full with it, the knowledge itching under his skin, making him need to move. He nodded his thanks to Pere before turning away silently, waving Guy back when he stepped forward with concern on his face.

It was stupid, he thought as he climbed back up to the walls, back to his abandoned watch post. It was stupid to be-- to be mourning, or whatever, after all this time, because it wasn't like he didn't know his brother was dead. That his entire family was dead, and had been for nearly two hundred years. All the people he'd ever known except for Guy were dead, just footnotes in some history book, and he _knew_ that. But--

Hearing it laid out like that-- _no children, end of the royal line_ \-- it somehow made it that much more real.

He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him and frowned, ready to tell Guy off for following him after all-- only when he turned, he found Basch rounding the corner at the last step, instead. "Oh," he said, blinking. "Uh, hi."

"If I'm intruding," the older man said formally, "please tell me."

"No, it's fine," Luke said automatically. He turned to look back out over the wall, not entirely sure he wanted company, but not really knowing how to say that to a near-stranger.

"I couldn't help but hear, downstairs," Basch went on, coming up to lean on the stone a few paces away, also looking outward. "And I think I remember learning of you, after all. You and your brother were twin-born, were you not?"

Luke closed his eyes and nodded. The weird pressure growing in his throat wouldn't let him do anything else.

A quiet breath, and then the light rasp of Basch's voice came again. "I had a brother as well," he said. "A twin. When the Empire started closing its grip on Landis, I left for Dalmasca where they were still free, intending to help them fight. I believe it was known as Chesedonia, in your time. Noah stayed behind. He didn't see the harm in the Archadians taking a more active role in our lands, while I-- well, I had too much pride, I suppose. We argued. That was the last time we ever spoke. And that is the hardest part of this for me, I think," he went on quietly. "Losing any chance I might have had to set things right between us."

"I'm sorry," Luke murmured, glancing aside at the other man. Basch had been staring steadily out over the countryside beyond the castle's walls, though he didn't look like he was actually seeing any of it; at Luke's words he glanced back with a quiet, strained smile. They both lapsed into a silence that was far more comfortable than before, and slowly the pressure inside Luke's skin started to ease away.

When he sighed and sagged against the wall, Basch reached out and briefly touched his shoulder, drawing his attention. "I can take the watch, if you like," he said, then quirked a sly grin. "If nothing else, you should go and reassure your friend that you're well; he may have actually paced a hole in the floor by now, to keep from coming to check on you."

Luke laughed, a little self-conscious. "Yeah, he's maybe a little overprotective. Was even before all of this happened, so you can only imagine how much worse it's gotten."

"He sounds like a good friend."

Luke felt his smile soften. "Yeah. It's weird, maybe," he added after a second, not sure why he was talking other than that Basch seemed willing to listen. "But in a way I'm kind of glad they put us together like this. Not-- y'know," he added hastily. "I don't mean like that. But-- well, at least it means I've got someone I know in this mess with me." He looked at Basch consideringly, biting the corner of his lip. "Do you-- I mean, your partner didn't--"

Basch shook his head. "I'm told we were typically paired with someone known to us, so I suspect I know who it would have been. He captained the infantry as I did the cavalry, during Dalmasca's final push. I saw him captured just seconds before I myself was taken, though I don't remember much after that."

"None of us do. Except Cloud, maybe," Luke added thoughtfully. "There's something about him, I think he may remember more than he's telling."

Basch made a considering sound. "Some drug, perhaps, as part of the treatment, taking away our memories from that time." He shook his head, eyes sharp on the distance as he looked out over the wall. "In any case, I believe I understand what you meant. Vossler and I were friends; I do rather wish he were here. He was always a good man to have at your back when push came to shove. And I somehow have the feeling," he added gravely, "that we may need friends like that, in whatever lies ahead."


	6. Chapter 6

When Basch shouted down the news that another party was approaching the castle, Roy tensed despite himself, knowing what was coming. Sure enough, Kimberly came sauntering through the door entirely too short a time later. Seeing him, Roy felt yet another surge of profound gratitude that the scientists had not been mad or sadistic enough to pair the two of them together.

While he and Hughes had been arrested for conspiring against the corrupt heads of their military, Kimberly had been imprisoned for the far more obvious reason of murdering the other members of his own squad. Roy had made a point of warning each of their new recruits about him in turn, not bothering to wait until the man himself was out of earshot. Kimberly, for his part, had just stood there and smirked back at him. Roy could only hope no one had missed how he didn't deny any of it.

"Mustang," Kimberly said, walking up until his boots were only inches away from Roy's face. "Sleeping on the job again?"

Before Roy could formulate an appropriate response, another figure ducked through the door and did it for him. "Now, now," Jade said with a mild smile, "play nice with the other children."

Roy didn't quite relax, not entirely, but he may have started to breathe a little easier. Jade simply kept _looking_ at Kimberly until Kimberly spread his hands, ever so slightly, and moved away.

Jade, at first, had reminded Roy of Kimberly, which certainly hadn't made him inclined to like or trust the man. But Luke and Guy had both vouched for him, had apparently known him in their old lives. And when Roy had given his warning to the lot of them after pulling them out of their tanks, Jade had been the only one to look at Kimberly with a flat, practical assessment. It was the sort of look that wondered if it would be better all around to simply kill the man now, before he could turn on them.

That had actually done a lot to win Roy over, since Roy had long ago decided that knifing Kimberly while he slept would have been a kindness to the world. It would certainly have been a kindness to Roy himself.

Kimberly wasn't insane; he knew exactly what he was doing. That just made him all the more dangerous.

Still, if they weren't going to kill him-- and it seemed that they weren't-- keeping him close was still better than turning him loose on an unsuspecting world. And Roy did sleep a little better knowing that Jade probably would dispatch the man if he thought it necessary. Roy wondered if it was that kind of cold-minded attitude that had kept Kimberly in line all these months, or maybe he just liked the challenge that Jade posed-- however it had come to be, Jade seemed to be the only one out of the lot of them that Kimberly actually listened to.

David and Rush piled through the door after Jade, side by side and perfectly coordinated as they settled their packs and supplies. Roy eyed them and rolled his eyes, making himself a bet as to when their fourth pair would disappear off to a quiet corner. They were standing very close, and each had a vaguely strained look around their eyes-- they must have had a very long and very _public_ journey.

Jade moved to bend heads with Vincent, who ceded his datascreen without protest. Jade was admittedly brilliant-- if anyone would be able to make sense of the scraps of information they'd found, it was him. Roy watched sidelong for a moment, absently studying the little frown of concentration between Jade's eyes, then gave a mental shrug and settled back in place.

If anything exciting happened, surely someone would wake him.

An unknown time later, Roy cracked an eye open when someone dug a toe into his side. "Rise and shine, sweetheart," Kimberly said with a wide smile. "Looks like our glorious leaders are ready to speak."

Roy allowed himself a mild glare, then sat up and stretched. Everyone had gathered in the main hall while he dozed, the whole mismatched lot of them clustered along the walls and apparently focused on the far end of the room where Jade and Vincent were conversing in low, intense tones.

"So?" Rush said eagerly, sitting cross-legged on the floor. "What's the news?" David was seated next to him, legs outstretched, shoulder leaned into Rush's own; the two of them looked a little rumpled, and Roy smirked briefly before turning his attention back to Jade.

Jade nodded to himself and made one final notation on the datascreen before clearing his throat. "There are still some significant gaps," he began, "but from all of the data we've gathered I believe we can at least confirm a few theories.

"This is how it began: facing some unknown threat," he went on, intoning each word as if giving a lecture, "the major governments of the three worlds set aside their own differences and arranged, in secret, to create a defence system. This was approximately two hundred and fifty years ago. The technology required for the program was only barely in development, but they hired the top minds in biological and military research and spent no small part of their treasuries in building the first test facilities. Then, using subjects gleaned from prisons, army ranks, and any other sources they could find, they began their studies.

"Subjects with a military or similar background apparently had an advantage when it came to survival-- their bodies simply accepted the treatments better. Hence the backgrounds of everyone here, I would say. So in time, they began culling their subjects from those sources, exclusively. Apparently, the full treatment to create a super-soldier from an ordinary human takes approximately two years to complete--"

"Two years," Seifer interrupted. "That's it? Then why the fuck was I in that shit for fifty? Or them for two _hundred_?" he went on, gesturing towards Luke and Guy.

"I was about to get to that," Jade said pleasantly, with a smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. Seifer's own eyes narrowed, but he subsided with a sniff.

Maybe he had a brain in amongst all that muscle, after all.

"The purpose of the program," Jade went on after a breath, "was to create an army against the impending threat I mentioned. Now, as our enhancements do not seem to include immortality, it can be presumed that we were kept in stasis following treatment in order to maintain the most substantial army possible for when it was necessary."

"In other words," Guy said grimly, "they were building their forces. Keeping us all alive and frozen until they needed us."

"Precisely." Jade looked down to the screen again, tapping through several pages of text and wearing a small, thoughtful frown. "As for the pairing phenomenon-- there is less information available on that, and obviously nothing about the side-effects upon release as no one was ever released while the program was active. But the explanation does seem rather obvious, upon reflection."

"Lay it on us, then," Rush said.

"We know for certain that one of their goals was to create fighting units, pairs that would anticipate each other's actions and have a vested interest in watching each other's backs. In that sense, they succeeded, because there certainly is a connection between the selected individuals." Jade shrugged, looking too amused. "Only they underestimated the fact that humans are flesh and blood and hormones, and would not be able to support such a bond on a purely mental or intellectual level. Instead what they created was a deep-seated psychological need to make sure that one's partner was alive and well, which translated to--"

"Sex," Seifer finished bluntly, and he snorted. "Pretty stupid, for smart people. After a fight, you fuck to prove you're alive. Human nature. You'd think they woulda figured on that."

Jade smiled, minutely. "Quite."

"Okay," Luke said after a stretch of silence in which they all tried to digest what they'd heard. "Okay, so that's how it all started. We know what they did to us and we kind of know why-- was there anything else in there about this mysterious enemy they wanted us to fight?"

"Sadly, no," Jade replied, shaking his head. "That information was apparently at a higher level of clearance than anyone at a mere lab possessed."

Luke sighed. "Damn."

"How about why it all went wrong, then?" Guy asked. "Why was the project abandoned like it was, if it was so important?"

"Nothing we didn't already suspect," Vincent said quietly. "The main reason for the people's revolt seems to have been financial. Too many tax dollars being funnelled into the program, with nothing tangible to show for it. Some few groups at the time made claims of military conspiracy, and thus there was some backlash against organizations like SEED. But most of the blame was placed on the various governments."

"Most were forced to pull funding and disavow all involvement-- or were simply overthrown," Jade finished for him. "And thus we were left to languish, abandoned."

They were all very quiet for a time after that-- Roy, at least, feeling somewhat frustrated. They'd made progress in their search for answers, certainly, but nothing truly significant, because for him at least it was the _why_ that was most important. Why would so many separate and often conflicting governments come together for something like this? What sort of threat could have been great enough to prompt such cooperation, when they all had to know that it wouldn't look good in the eyes of their populace? Or had the leaders of the world just been so power-mad as to try to play gods right under the noses of the worlds?

"So what do we do next?" Yuri asked at last.

"It's obvious," David said quietly. His accent still proclaimed him as being from one of the city-states in the far south of Trabia, all but cut off from the rest by desert. "You said that this program was worldswide. We've only searched one of them."

Jade nodded. "There are two off-world coordinates that might lead us to further facilities. We would have to use a portal to reach them, of course, and that might prove difficult. I, for one, don't even know where the nearest portal location is; that technology was after my time."

"Baticul," Basch said, unexpectedly, and all eyes turned on him. "Unless it's been disabled, there will be one in Baticul."

"Really?" Guy said, surprised. "I know they were talking about putting one there, when the design and testing were finally done, but I didn't expect Archades to let them keep it."

Basch only shrugged. "Apparently they had their reasons."

"Well, then. Any objections?" Jade paused for a moment, though Roy expected it was just for show. "Then I propose that as soon as our local contact gets back to us with some fuel, we start out for Baticul."

He turned away, and with that the meeting seemed to be over. Everyone began to disperse to their blankets or the fire or, in the case of some, to a secluded nook. Roy saw Seifer looking intently at a determinedly oblivious Squall, not long after both Luke and Guy had disappeared together, and he shook his head. Not waiting to watch the fireworks, he pushed himself up and started for the stairs instead.

Up on the balcony, Roy cast one quick, searching look over the landscape before tipping his head back to look at the sky. He sought out and eventually found the first speck of a star as the evening deepened, and smiled a bit bemusedly.

Travelling to the stars it had never been a dream of his, though Hughes had talked about it often enough. It seemed, however, that fate was leaving him little choice in the matter.

***

Seifer rolled his shoulders until the joints popped, grateful that the talking was over-- it meant he didn't have to pay attention anymore. And he'd actually been trying to, since he did figure all of that crap was stuff that he should know, being a pretty big part of what had become of his life, and all. He wasn't stupid, for all that some of his instructors back in the day had thought otherwise. He knew that if he was going to live the rest of his life as some sort of lab freak, he should know the details of what that meant.

Basically, he figured it boiled down to the fact that a bunch of scientists and politicians had fucked them over, and then got their asses kicked for it. Kinda funny, really, in that sense. Karmic retribution, or some shit. Served them right.

But as much as he'd tried, he'd found it very damned hard to concentrate on anything other than the prissy little bastard sitting on the other side of the room from him-- about as far away as the limits of the room and the ever-increasing pull between them allowed.

He knew was staring again, as the meeting broke up and everyone started going off to their own business. He knew he was staring. Couldn't stop it, though. And he knew the princess had to be getting just as itchy inside his skin as Seifer himself was, but he still just kept _sitting_ there, glaring at everything all at once, ignoring Seifer with enough determination that Seifer was surprised he didn't just pop right out of existence.

But that was the princess for you, stubborn to a fuckin' fault. Made Seifer want to _strangle_ the little bitch, but as that wasn't an option anymore, it looked like he'd have to find an alternative.

Seifer wasn't stupid, and he wasn't inobservant either. It hadn't escaped his attention the way the ones he'd pegged as other pairs went off into the halls and came back more than a little while later looking all flushed and sweaty. Pretty obvious what they were doing, and pretty obvious _why_.

 _Give it time_ , Luke had said, only he hadn't said that time would make any of it go away, only that you learned to live with it. And apparently living with it meant ducking off for a fuck in the closet every now and then, to keep their heads on straight. Hell, if it meant getting rid of the feeling like he was going to explode right out of his skin, or grab on to that arrogant pissy bastard and never let go--

Seifer considered the options, then gritted his teeth and just-- got up. Made himself walk out of the room and into the corridor beyond, aiming for what he hoped would be an empty room, refusing to give in to the feeling like there was a rope around his neck pulling him back.

He grinned tightly to himself when he was chased out by a sharp sound, like leather on stone.

Sure enough, not long after he'd found that secluded little room, Squall came storming in after him, hands balled up, scowling fit to spit sparks. Seifer managed to meet him with a grin. "You gettin' sick of this yet, princess?"

"Fuck you," Squall ground out, and Seifer shook his head, the familiar rush of the fight already starting to build.

"Baby, you say the sweetest things."

Squall took a swing at him the moment he was close enough; Seifer dodged that one, and the next, and rolled his shoulder to absorb the third as he moved in and grabbed Squall's arms. The moment of contact sent a shiver of relief and arousal and sheer adrenaline along his nerves. He snarled against it, swung Squall around and threw him into the wall, following in close. Part of him wanted to put a hand to Squall's face, just to touch; he made himself wrap it around Squall's throat, instead.

And there he froze, torn by the conflicting urges, seeing a frustrated echo of his own inner battle in Squall's eyes. It was almost a relief when the _thing_ between them flared up and took over.

Squall grabbed at his shoulders, bucked up against his hips-- practically _climbing_ him with the support of the wall to help. Seifer grabbed at those hips and pushed, twisting them until he was pressed neck to knee against Squall's back. His hand moved, almost of its own accord, to knead once at the front of Squall's pants and elicit a strangled sound, before making short work of the buttons there.

Squall almost recovered himself enough to protest when Seifer yanked his pants down to his knees, rucked his shirts up beneath his arms-- he gave a strangled sound of outrage and kind of twitched all over-- but it turned into a shudder when Seifer got a hand on his cock. Squall's head fell forward between his braced arms, and Seifer _leaned_ , letting his own weight keep Squall pinned, letting Squall's arms keep them braced, and got his other hand down to open up his own fly.

At the first push of his naked cock along the crack of Squall's ass, Squall's whole body jerked. "You--"

"Nuh-uh," Seifer said, and reached up to press two fingers into Squall's mouth, stifling the outraged sound he made. Teeth bit down immediately, but Seifer just hissed and pushed harder, using his hand on Squall's cock to tug faster until Squall shuddered again and the teeth released into a hot swipe of tongue.

And then, then Seifer groaned himself, pushed them both forward as much as he could, and kept moving until he came all over the small of Squall's back. Squall's teeth bit down again as he came as well, splattering the wall, but Seifer hardly noticed. There was blood on Squall's mouth, though, as they broke apart at last, his teeth stained red with it. Which was, some part of Seifer thought, pretty fucking hot in a fucked up sort of way. But then, the entire thing was really pretty fucked up.

He shook his hand, wincing. "Fucking hell," he muttered. "You little prick, you nearly bit my fingers off." He flexed them, gritting his teeth, eyeing the dark red gouges still sluggishly oozing blood.

"Serves you right," Squall muttered, eyes on Seifer's hand. "If you ever--"

"Yeah, yeah," Seifer interrupted, tucking himself away and doing up his fly. He eyed the way Squall was standing, shoulders up and awkward against the mess on his back-- and Seifer found his smirk again. "See you 'round, princess."

Squall growled at him as he turned to leave but Seifer ignored him, too caught up in the discovery that he _could_ turn around and walk away without feeling like he was being reeled back. The link, whatever it was, it was still there but it was bearable again, letting him leave Squall and his growled threats behind, letting him close the door between them.

He caught himself grinning as he walked away, too relieved at regaining that tiny bit of freedom not to show it. It wasn't even that much of a price, really; he wondered how much the link would relax if he actually opened the princess up and fucked him proper.

Seifer rolled his shoulders, straightened his clothes one last time, and decided to explore the castle instead of going back to the rest. He hadn't had the chance to yet, after all, and these old places usually had all kinds of secrets for someone who knew how to look for them. He might as well take advantage of his freedom while he had it.

And as he walked, he did his best to ignore the nagging sense of _Squall_ that lingered behind him, just like he ignored the little part of him that worried this sort of arrangement wouldn't be enough forever.


	7. Chapter 7

Luke was fiddling with his hat again, wriggling a finger up underneath the edge of it; Guy nudged him none-too-gently in the side and got a half-hearted glare for his trouble. It wasn't that Guy thought Luke would really knock the thing loose, not on purpose, but sometimes he just didn't think his actions through. And they really didn't need to draw any more attention to themselves.

Showing off a head of bright red hair while walking the streets of what had been the capital city of Kimlasca was therefore high on their list of things _not_ to do. They could be grateful, at least, that it was cool enough for a hat not to look out of place.

Seeing what had become of Baticul over the past two centuries was shocking, to say the least. Guy still remembered his first impressions of the city, when he'd arrived as part of the Malkuth delegation to discuss a joint defense against the growing Archadian Empire. It was mostly a memory of height, of open views and wide streets and the rattle of the trolleys and elevators moving between levels. There had been so many people, constant streams of them moving in and out of the marketplace and coliseum and temple. Not that the Malkuth capital of Grand Chokmah had any fewer people, but they had more room to spread out there, and it showed.

Two centuries later and the people were still there-- strangely dressed, to Guy's eyes, and far noisier than he remembered. And if he'd thought there were a lot of them before, there were so many more now, crammed into the corners, shoving past each other on the walkways and staircases. Everything looked dimmer, somehow, the colours faded, the surfaces dusted over and worn down.

"This way," Basch murmured, leading them forward. Guy chanced a look over his shoulder, making sure the others were still behind them. They'd agreed to split up and move through the city in smaller groups where they could-- fifteen fighters was a bit obvious travelling together, but enough people still came and went from the coliseum that a few here and there didn't turn any heads.

The basic layout of the city hadn't changed that much, not at the heart of it-- there were only so many changes that could be made to the infrastructure of a city built into the side of a cliff, after all. But on the lower levels, at least, streets had been shifted or split or in-filled, and Guy had trouble fitting what he remembered onto what was currently there. Luckily, Basch's knowledge of the city was far more recent than either Luke's or his, and he was leading them forward with only a few false turns.

Guy wondered if the upper tiers were just as changed. The nobility had always been legendarily jealous of their properties, but who knew how many of them had made it through Archades taking over, never mind the last fifty years. Baticul seemed to have fared better than other cities they'd seen-- better than Balamb, for example-- probably due to the presence of the portal, but Guy could already see that it hadn't escaped unscathed.

The city was still enough his home that it kind of hurt to see it so changed. He could imagine how Luke must have been feeling-- could feel the agitated roil of Luke's emotions in the back of his own head. The look in Luke's eyes as he worked through the crowds made Guy walk a little closer.

Basch gestured them forward again, leading them through a side passage and from there to what looked like an old maintenance elevator.

"How do you know all of this?" Guy murmured to him as they paused to let the others catch up, eyeing the battered mechanics of the lift. This wasn't the first time Basch had shown them some sneaky back route around a guard post or between levels.

Basch gave a crooked smile over his shoulder. "The product of a misspent youth," he answered.

For security reasons, the portal facilities weren't actually part of the palace. The portals had been created as major transportation routes that could shuffle streams of people and trade goods between worlds, after all, and thus weren't easy to guard. The designers had therefore placed the Baticul portal on its own tier of the city and built an entire facility around it, with warehousing space for transport goods and a series of offices for those in charge of running the thing. It was an ugly grey building that would have stood out from old Baticul like an eyesore.

Five guards stood at the front entrance, with more probably waiting inside-- Guy eyed the surrounding landscape and nodded agreement when Basch pointed them back the way they had come. Not that they couldn't have taken care of any number of guards, among themselves-- it was entirely possible they could have ripped their own doorway right through the wall-- but it still seemed better to do things quietly, if possible. So the rear service entrance with its two visible guards was still a better choice, even if it made some members of their party grumble.

They muscled past the two guards, Guy and Luke moving to knock them senseless before they were even aware of the intrusion. The door was locked but it yielded to Basch's twist and push, and then they were filtering in by twos and threes, taking up watchful positions along the walls until everyone was inside.

The halls beyond had the plain, unadorned look of warehouses everywhere, occasionally given a wash of paint where there were more offices than storage rooms. They climbed and descended several sets of stairs, backtracked a couple of times and had to incapacitate four more guards and a rather stunned trio of maintenance workers before getting to the actual portal room, a massive thing with a high ceiling that was unremarkable but for the control pedestal to one side. The portal itself was a featureless grey square on the far wall.

There were at least thirty uniformed guards between them and it, all of whom came abruptly to attention when one happened to be looking just the right way to notice Roy's head as it darted a look around the corner. Someone shouted in wordless alarm, and Guy heard Luke mutter something uncomplimentary under his breath.

Guy firmed his grip on his sword and swung around the corner of the doorway, ducking and weaving instinctively even though none of the guards seemed to have guns ready. He dove into their midst with Luke moving at his side like an extension of himself, cutting effortlessly through the guards' forward line. It was the first time they'd really fought together since Kaitzur, since this whole mess began, and the change was startling-- he was very _aware_ of Luke's position beside him, to the point where he could almost see where Luke would go before he moved. And Luke responded to his own movements as smoothly as if they'd been practicing it for months. It was-- it was _incredible_ , and Guy felt his mouth turning up in an entirely inappropriate grin.

Even so, they weren't quite fast enough-- one of the guards fumbled at a console on the wall and a siren began to wail throughout the facility. Bare seconds later the man was tumbling senselessly from Basch's fist, but the damage was already done.

A glance showed Jade and Roy working furiously at the portal controls and shortly thereafter the portal itself hummed to life, a ripple of air between the gateposts the only visible sign. Jade stepped through immediately.

Guy exchanged a startled look with Luke-- from their vantage, it looked unnervingly like Jade had vanished into thin air. Guy gritted his teeth, though, grabbed Luke's arm and ran. They hit the portal at a dead sprint just as a fresh wave of guards rounded the corner behind them, and then it all faded out.

***

Squall coughed as he came out of the portal, staggering the last few steps and jarring his ankles as he stumbled over an unseen drop. He doubled over as he came to a stop, breathing deep as he tried to control his rebellious stomach. Seifer muttered some kind of nasty comment, but Squall managed to ignore him-- Seifer had a rather pale, dazed look on his face, too, and the comment had been half-hearted as best, not worth a response.

Neither of them had ever traveled inter-world before; from the looks of things, most of the others hadn't either. The shock was supposed to be the worst the first time. Jade was one of the few who maintained his composure, but from what little he'd seen of the man Squall wasn't sure that anything ever fazed him.

The room they had emerged in was a twin of the one on the other side, except that it was currently empty. Empty, but obviously not abandoned-- the floors were clean and the portal controls looked well-maintained. Squall strained his ears, and thought he heard the faint sounds of motion and voices in the hallways beyond. "We should get moving," he said in a low tone.

"I hate to agree with him," Seifer added, looking around narrowly, "but I can't help but notice that there aren't many _doors_ here. Be a bad place to get caught."

Vincent was already ghosting towards the exit. "Someone will have noticed the portal activating," he said. "We should make as much progress as possible before whoever runs this facility realizes that we are not an authorized transport party."

"'s what I said," Seifer muttered. Squall scowled at him by reflex, then scowled harder when he realized that he'd already fallen in at Seifer's shoulder in a defensive posture. For a moment he considered stepping away, but eventually discarded the idea. Whatever their connection was, he admitted grudgingly, it did make them fight better together. That had been proven back in Baticul, despite the fact that a few unenhanced guards were hardly any kind of challenge

Just then, in a strange place against an unknown number of foes-- it made sense to take any advantage they could get. Even if it was one he'd still rather do without.

They almost managed a seamless escape. Most guards didn't expect intruders to be coming from inside the area they were guarding, after all. But all it took was one startled runner that they didn't manage to silence quickly enough, and then there were pounding footsteps chasing them as they made their way through the maze of passages towards what was hopefully an exit. It was just instinct leading them-- moving them towards a vague sense of open air beyond concrete walls.

Squall took a firmer grip on his gunblade and held it ready as the first enemy body came into view ahead of them, cutting them off. At his back, Seifer laughed low in his throat.

When they finally hit open air, they just kept on running, aiming for the nearest cover-- though the shock of the air hit Squall like a slap to the face as they left the climate-controlled building. It was _hot_ , hotter than summer in Balamb had ever been, and they were all dressed for autumn in Baticul. Squall was sweating beneath his leather before the portal building was out of sight.

It was bright, too-- the sun was a white glare that reflected off everything and rippled in waves above the few sprawling buildings. And maybe it was just the odd knowledge that he was on a different world than the one he knew, but everything looked kind of _wrong_ as a result, all the colours a little bit off. The plants were brown-edged, thick and waxy, totally unlike the forests that clung to the remote parts of Trabia.

They came to a halt some distance away, after the last confused shouts of the guards had faded, to catch their breath and take stock of their surroundings. Seifer cursed as he shook sand off his boot; Squall smirked at him, and tried not to fidget at the drip of sweat running down his neck.

"So," Yuri said, "that's done. Where to next?" He had already shed his outer shirt, and was fanning himself with one hand.

They had a map, courtesy of an abandoned tourist's kiosk near the portal building in Batciul. Jade spread it out on the ground and, after a moment of consideration, pointed. "There," he said. "Our coordinates seem to point us there."

Squall looked at the pointing finger, and dubiously eyed the spot that it had settled on-- a little blob of brown in a whole lot of blue.

"Doesn't look like much," Seifer said, echoing his thoughts.

"Nevertheless," Jade said with suspicious cheer, "that seems to be our goal. Shall we?"

***

No one glanced at them twice on the ferries, which was a relief but also a bit of an anticlimax. There was apparently enough transient traffic moving between the islands that they could go unnoticed, even with a group as incredibly unwieldy as theirs was-- either that or the islanders really were just that laid-back. They certainly didn't seem to let much bother them, from what Luke had seen so far. Maybe that was what had let them survive the political upheavals with so little visible effect, or maybe it just hadn't hit this world as hard as his own.

When they departed the mainland-- a pretty vague term, considering that it was just a really big island-- they skimmed the edge of the major tourist areas and hopped a series of ferry services along the keys that were scattered between their starting point and their destination. No ferries ran to the section of islands they needed to get to, though, so they played leapfrog with charter ships and rowboats and, finally, stowed away in the hold of a cargo freighter.

Eventually they did end up where they needed to be, and it quickly became obvious why it was so difficult to get to-- it was nothing but rock barrens and shrub thickets as far as the eye could see, with very few signs of habitation. The dock was a long thin plank connected to a mining outpost; they narrowly escaped having to swim to shore, which was a relief since Luke remembered what it was like to get salt water in your clothes.

They set out overland, using Vincent's datascreen to give them a fix on their destination. Luke was pretty sure the thing was finally broken when it brought them to what looked like a solid rock face in the midst of a craggy set of hills. A little poking around uncovered a door set into the cliff itself, though, and even with the opening mechanism corroded away by wind and sand and neglect, they managed to force their way inside.

The lights were slow to activate-- circuits and machinery surrounding the solar batteries long unused, chugging reluctantly to life. It was therefore still very dim when they found the expected hallway of darkened hatches, shadows thick in the corners and cast in sharp relief by the few emergency lights that were still in full working order. They triggered the release sequence just by habit, and nothing on the control panel lit up to indicate there was an active tank-- no survivors, which was not entirely a surprise. When they walked the line, though, to be sure, they found no indication that the few very high-tech capsules had ever been used in the first place.

"This is somehow even creepier than all the rest of them," Luke said to Guy in an undertone, "and I didn't think that was possible. Why is there a state-of-the-art laboratory with no test subjects?"

"Maybe the program was abandoned before they could use it?" Guy suggested with a shrug.

"I guess," Luke replied dubiously, still looking around with wide eyes.

"Stairs," Vincent called, and they all went forward and up.

The second floor was full of storage rooms and unlabelled boxes. The floor above that one appeared to be living quarters, which was something new-- but all of the rooms were empty, showing signs of being packed up and evacuated quickly.

"Creepy," Rush muttered, and Luke tossed him a commiserating grin.

The uppermost floors contained office cubicles and file rooms, rows of desks with empty files on top of them. And when they broke into the sealed room at the very top of the stairs, the big shiny bank of datascreens they found there made Jade's eyes go alarmingly glinty.

They all crowded around as Vincent hooked up his palm-sized 'screen, Luke not the only one craning his neck in an attempt to see the display-- until Vincent turned to fix them with a glower and Jade, just behind him, _smiled_ in a way that had them scattering to wait elsewhere. Luke sat to keep himself from pacing, and Guy leaned against the wall nearby; the rest took up similar poses of waiting, though none of them really took their eyes off the two at the far end of the room.

Thankfully, it didn't take very long-- Luke hoped that meant that the stored information was just in better shape than it had been at the previous locations, and not that it was missing entirely. The blank look on Jade's face as he finally sat back didn't seem to bode well, but on Jade that expression could have meant absolutely anything.

After a moment's silence, Jade cleared his throat-- and began to read.

"'By this proclamation and the signatures and seals hereon, a cease-fire and unconditional truce is declared between all nations of the three worlds so that they might join forces against their common enemy. The entity from beyond the stars, to be known henceforth as JENOVA, is a scourge upon mankind that must be met with such force as is necessary to expel its influence back into to void from whence it comes.'

"'By this agreement, each signatory nation will contribute a percentage of the necessary manpower, and as much monetary, technological and personnel support as is feasible, to be determined in future consultations. Each agrees to construct and support the necessary laboratory facilities within its own border--'"

Jade cut off, eyes flickering back and forth as he skimmed the text. "The rest of the document essentially lays out what we have surmised so far, and gives further details about each participant's requirements. It is signed by the ruling councils or monarchs of each nation on all three worlds, and dated two hundred and sixty-four years ago."

Jade set down the datascreen with a delicate _click_ , and for a moment silence hung thickly in the air. Then--

"Aliens?" Rush said. " _Aliens_ , seriously?"

Jade shook his head. "It appears so."

Rush made an incredulous sound and sagged back against the wall. "Just when I thought this couldn't get any weirder."

"I expect that sort of reaction is precisely why the public was never informed of the program," Jade remarked. "All they would have seen were their resources and money going into some farce of a program-- and one that, as a bonus, required human test subjects. I doubt it would have made the rulers of the time very popular."

"But there must have been some proof," David protested. "The ones who signed that document must have known beyond a doubt that their supposed enemy was real. So many separate and opposing nations would not have set aside their differences and started a project of such scope and risk just on a hunch."

Jade gave an eloquent shrug. "The minds of people are baffling things. The minds of politicians, even more so."

"So, do we have any new coordinates to check out?" Yuri asked after a moment, and Luke was actually a bit relieved when Jade shook his head. He was getting a little tired of running all around the three worlds chasing clues that usually ended up being nothing at all-- go figure-- and he figured he couldn't be the only one.

"No, we may have reached our limits when it comes to laboratories, for the moment." Jade flicked the screen through several pages before he let it come to rest. "There may well be more; in fact I would be surprised if we've managed to find them all already. However, much of the more recent information here is heavily encrypted, which means it may actually be useful but also means that it will take time to decipher.

"There is something," he added after a pause, eyes moving again. "Several memos between the project's administrators-- incredibly vague, of course, but all concerning the one of the three worlds we have not yet visited. There is an attached file with some manner of coordinates, although it doesn't seem to follow the usual system."

"So we go world-hopping again and figure it out when we get there," Rush said with a shrug. "Maybe the locals will be able to help. We're not about to stop now, when we're so close to figuring all this out, right?" Around the circle, a few other heads nodded in agreement.

"If that is the group's decision?" Jade looked around and noted the shrugs and nods given in reply. "Fine. But we will not likely be able to use the same portal we arrived by; they'll have increased their security after we left. We'll have to find another, and hope that they have not taken similar measures."

"And how do we do that?"

Jade pulled a sheaf of maps and papers off a nearby shelf, and tossed the whole mess on the table with a beatific smile. "Start looking."


	8. Chapter 8

When they exited the portal, it was to absolute silence-- not just from an absence of people but absence of _anything_ , even the expected ventilation hum or rattle of machinery in the distance. Just-- dead space. There was dust on the floor and the air smelled musty, smelled of places sealed up for too long.

It reminded Guy far too much of the labs for his peace of mind.

It was good that their eyesight was so much better than it used to be, because the facility was dim, and the emergency lights far too infrequent for anyone that was merely human to find their way by. As it was, they still moved in a cautious train through the corridors, taking it slow and careful and following the sound of each other's footsteps through the darkest sections.

When they finally emerged to see sky above, Guy waited-- but the expected sense of relief didn't come, and he couldn't quite tell why. He looked around sharply, seeing crumbling buildings and debris everywhere-- like the ruin of Balamb only a hundred times worse. But it was nothing he hadn't imagined, and not enough to explain the way his hand had gone tight around the hilt of his sword.

It took Vincent stopping just ahead to take a deep, considering breath, before he figured it out. "The air is still stale," Guy murmured, realizing. "We're outside, but it still feels like we're closed in."

"Hm," Jade said, and stepped forward a few paces, taking his hands out of his pockets. Looking slowly from side to side, he reached out one hand into the empty air.

His fingers touched something that gave way with a faint ripple of light, like a soap bubble stretched thin around his skin. Luke made a faint sound of surprise which Guy couldn't help but echo. "What the--"

Jade waggled his fingers, watching the resulting glimmers of light as they gradually spelled out the shape of a dome arching over both them and the building behind them. "Interesting," was all Jade said, before he stepped forward.

Beyond the barrier, the air was immediately and noticeably fresher, moving in a faint wind, though it still smelled dry and dusty. It was still silent, too, and the windows of the nearest buildings were dark. Looking around, Guy's sense of unease didn't really go away, and he knew he wasn't the only one when Rush said, quietly: "Maybe we should go back to the portal and get our bearings first. I don't think there'll be any locals here to give us a map this time."

"Not a bad suggestion," Roy added, looking around with narrowed eyes.

However, when they turned around to go back they found that the barrier, which had stretched around them so obligingly the first time, had become a solid, unyielding wall keeping them from returning to the portal. It resisted even their enhanced strength when they tried to force their way through.

"Great," Seifer growled. He slammed a fist into the barrier, making it spit off a few little sparks but otherwise having no effect. "Now what?"

Guy looked at the others-- looked at Luke, who gave him back a helpless shrug-- then turned to give the area around them a closer inspection. The growing itch between his shoulderblades was telling him to make a break for the nearest ruined building-- it looked like it would tumble in around their ears but it still sounded better than just standing there in the open. But that would mean leaving the portal behind, which was their one way out of there if things really were as bad as he was somehow beginning to think they were.

David cleared his throat. "Perhaps--"

Before he could continue, Vincent was taking a step forward, posture gone completely rigid. "Listen."

All but holding his breath, Guy did. And he, along with everyone else, froze on the spot when he heard the sound in the distance, getting louder by the second, mechanical and moving in fast. Instinct and a lack of better options had them hunching back against the barrier at the sound, shoulder to shoulder and weapons ready.

When the source of the noise appeared it was far smaller than Guy had expected: a vehicle of some kind, dark and quick and heavily modified by someone who didn't really care about aesthetics. It was driven by a figure in goggles and a shapeless grey jacket, who slewed his vehicle to a sudden stop when he caught sight of them. One gloved hand pushed up the goggles to let the man look at them incredulously. His eyes went to the portal building and then to them again, back and forth, and then he let out a string of curses that had some of the others arching impressed eyebrows.

"You took the wrong train, boys," the man called. "Wish I could help you, but the Bronco here's only got room for one." He patted his transport fondly.

"If you can run," he said then, pulling his goggles back down, "you can try to follow me back to the fort. Don't imagine it'll do you much good, but you're welcome to try." And with that, the stranger gunned his engine and took off, cutting an impressively quick path through the scattered debris with what looked like the ease of practice.

And as the sound of the vehicle started to fade, Guy noticed with a sudden, sharp unease that he could hear another noise as well. Not loud, especially not in the wake of the engine roar, and very subtle, like-- footsteps. A lot of footsteps, all coming toward them very quickly.

"You know," Rush said, "I'm good with running."

They hesitated for just a moment longer before taking off in the wake of the stranger's vehicle. Guy stretched his legs, pumped his arms, and even surprised himself-- they were so fast, heavy boots and weaponry and all, running after the haze of dust that the vehicle left behind. Guy had always been quick, but the laboratory treatments had apparently taken it even further, and he had to squint through watering eyes at the force of the wind on his face. Ahead, he caught a glimpse of the stranger looking back incredulously, mouth slack below the dark line of his goggles.

They followed the stranger's trail to a large building that didn't really seem to be in any better shape than the rest, although its walls and outer doors had been reinforced-- with piles of rubble, metal beams, seemingly anything that came to hand. They followed right into the low-ceilinged antechamber beyond the gate, just barely getting inside before a hatch slammed shut behind them.

The stranger was already off his bike when they came to a stop; he had both hands wrapped comfortably around a gun and was wedging himself defensively into a corner. "Okay," the stranger said, "I know I said to follow me, but that wasn't quite what I had in mind. How 'bout you just keep your distance 'til we finish up in here, hm?" He had a little stick of plastic tucked into the corner of his mouth, and he chewed on it in a way that made Guy wonder if he'd been a smoker.

The lights dimmed as a light mist began to hiss into the chamber. Luke twitched, and Guy stepped in instinctively close, both of them looking towards the ceiling. "The hell?"

"Decontamination process," Auron said, sounding surprisingly calm. "Relax." His eyes never left the stranger, though, and despite his deceptively relaxed posture there was a sharp look in his eye.

The stranger looked a little less hostile when the lights went back to normal and the far door hissed open, but he didn't drop his gun as he stepped backward out into the area beyond. There were more people there, all of them with guns, all of them staring at the newcomers with a certain wary hostility. "Captain," one of them called, "you all right?"

"Yeah, yeah," the stranger answered, his gaze never moving from his targets. "Right, then, who and what the fuck are you?"

"Cid," someone said softly. A woman pushed through the crowd and came up to put a hand on the man's arm, pushing the gun down. "They're not infected."

"You saw them," Cid said. "Ran faster than anyone still human could. What else could they be?"

The woman gave them an intent, curious look. "You're them, aren't you?" she said after a moment, sounding thoughtful. "The ones they made to protect us."

Cid blinked at the woman in surprise. "Say what?" He lowered his gun, though, and after a moment the rest did the same.

One of the other strangers, looking through a nearby viewport, cut off any further attempts at conversation with a curse. "We've got company."

For lack of better option, they followed when Cid took off towards the narrow stairs set nearby, climbing to an upper floor and looking out one of the barred windows there. The city beyond was in worse shape than the street-level view had suggested, a wasteland of grey-- quickly becoming lost in the solid wall of dust moving toward them through the abandoned streets.

"Shiva's teats," Cid yelped, "what the hell have you brought down on us?" He started hollering orders and everyone around him jumped, frantically closing up shutters and setting beams to reinforce the doors. Several people moved to man big, strange-looking cannons with long hoses attached. Another fussed over a control panel, twisting and pushing until a faint hum sounded-- a shimmering barrier, like the one that had kept them from the portal, swam into being around the building's perimeter.

Guy went to a window, squinting through the narrow opening. "What is it?" he asked tightly. "What's coming?" In response, Cid pointed, and Guy followed the finger to the first vague shape just becoming visible in the dust.

"They're just-- people," Luke said, sounding puzzled.

"Not anymore," Cid said grimly.

The first of those _people_ bunched themselves and took a fifty-foot leap towards the top of the wall. They rebounded off the barrier, which flared unevenly, and tumbled towards the ground-- but there were already two more behind them, flying though the air with arms outstretched.

"Shit!" Guy yelped, taking an involuntary step back.

"They called it a virus, when it first showed up," Cid said, low and even, eyes still fixed down below. "Infected half the city before anyone even realized it was there. But I ain't never seen a virus that can do _that_. Make people stronger and faster than anyone has a right to be, driving 'em mad-- all the same, like there was something in their heads, controlling 'em."

"JENOVA," Vincent murmured.

Cid glanced at him narrowly, but tellingly enough didn't question or contradict. "Later on, you and me are going to have a long talk about how you know that name," he said.

"How long ago did it start?" Jade asked.

"First one showed up maybe twenty-five years ago. I was just a kid when I saw my first, anyway. Since it's been this bad, though? Only the last couple of years. Probably, anyway. Kinda lost track, y'know."

"Are there other-- uh, uninfected people out there?" Rush asked then. "Any more places like this one?"

Cid chewed at his substitute cigarette and glowered out the window. "Don't know. Don't really think so. No one ever answered us on the radio, anyway, and to be honest there weren't many places set up as well as this one, to actually be able to keep those bastards out."

Someone muttered a heartfelt curse, and then they all settled into tense silence while they waited to see what would happen. The mob of infected swarmed at the barrier, making it pulse and waver in a way that had Guy holding his breath a couple of times, but they didn't break through. And eventually, after what seemed like hours of useless attacks, the crowd eventually began to drift away, leaving only settling dust in their wake.

Guy breathed a shaky sigh of relief as the last one vanished around a distant corner, sagging a little against the wall as the adrenaline crash hit. He licked his lips, opened his mouth and tried to figure out what to say-- and instead gave a quiet gasp that he heard several of the others echo, his eyes going wide.

He supposed it really was the first true threat they'd faced since this had all began, and he knew now how things were supposed to work with the designated pairs. It didn't quite prepare him for the undeniable and nearly overwhelming need that washed over him to grab Luke and find a dark corner. Or a not-so-dark corner-- or, hell, the wall right behind them was empty.

"Um," he said, voice strangled, fixing on Roy as the nearest body that would understand. "Room of some kind? Please? Now?"

Luke, beside him, made a sound low in his throat and leaned in, and Guy felt a shudder work its way down his spine. Just beyond Roy, Seifer and Squall were already pulling at each other, looking more like they were fighting than kissing, but the others pairs who were more used to things weren't in much better shape, wild around the eyes and standing too close.

Luckily, it didn't take Roy or the rest very long to figure it out. Guy honestly wasn't sure what happened or how they managed it, but before his self-control failed him entirely he was being shoved into a little closet of a room with Luke, and then there was nothing _but_ that for what felt like a long time.

***

"Someone want to tell me what the hell just happened?" Cid demanded after a long moment of stunned silence.

Roy glanced at the rest, who showed no indication of wanting to explain-- Jade was standing back looking far too amused; Vincent, Cloud and Auron were as uncommunicative as ever. Basch was looking uncertainly back and forth between them all, and Kimberly-- Kimberly was still staring back towards the windows with a hot, speculative look in his eyes, hands flexing. Roy fixed him with a hard glare until Kimberly noticed and looked back at him, tilting his head on a bland smile.

It didn't seem that anyone else was going to explain, though, and their erstwhile host was starting to get even more impatient, so eventually Roy sighed to himself and started into it.

After he finished, Cid just shook his head and cursed again. "Let me get this straight," he said sourly. "You yahoos are the ones Shera read about, these super-strong fighters who are supposed to save us from the piles of infected out there, and there's only fifteen of you? What the hell good is that going to do? Especially if half of you are too busy mackin' on each other to actually fight anything." He made a disgusted sound and threw up his hands.

"We didn't come here to fight your battles for you," Auron began, but Cid cut him off.

" _My_ battles? Oh, that's rich." Cid glared hotly, chewing at his stick and stepping in close. "Why do you think they made you lot in the first place? Against them, someone like me's got no chance. They catch me, they kill me or make me like them. Or both, maybe, I don't know how the fuck it works and I don't want to. If it were _my_ battle, we'd be fucked. You guys, though, you've actually got a fighting chance."

"Immunity," Jade murmured suddenly. "There was something about an immunity in the files. I had thought it simply referred to a boosted immune system, but if they knew that their mysterious enemy could do something like this--"

"They would have made us immune to the virus?" Roy filled in. "So we could fight off the infected and not catch their madness ourselves."

"Got it in one," Cid said, pointing.

"I would be very interested to find out," Jade said narrowly, "how they knew so much about this virus, enough to give us immunity against it. They must have had a sample, an infected host to test on and retrofit our own abilities from, but where they would have obtained such a thing--"

"We didn't know," Basch said quietly, mostly to Cid. "We didn't know any of this was happening here."

"Yeah, whatever." Cid turned away and curtly gestured for them to follow, after sending one last bewildered look towards the rooms in which they'd stowed their pairs. "All right, listen up, I'm only going to say this once. Main gate," he pointed, "stays shut at all times. Someone goes out, the gate gets closed tight behind them, and it only open again when the lookouts get the proper code over the radio. You'd still be out there, if you weren't so bloody fast," he added with a twist of a grin. "I was hoping I'd get inside and locked up before you caught me."

Roy shrugged; Cid didn't seem to want an apology of any kind, as he just walked on, pointing out features of the compound as they went further into it. The inside of the facility was a messy tangle of machinery and supplies stacked everywhere. People were far too infrequent-- or perhaps they staying hidden, nervous, which was certainly a fair enough response.

"Above the gate, your weapon," Vincent asked when it looked like their tour was winding down. "What is it?"

"Sand cannon," Cid answered, and it wasn't Roy's imagination that he sounded proud. "Use it to drive the infected away if they get too close or if the barrier blips and one gets inside. They can claw through normal walls in a matter of minutes-- the ones here might maybe last a bit longer, if we were lucky. So we have to push them back out as quick as possible."

"Your barrier isn't reliable?"

"Eh," Cid answered, waving a hand noncommittally. "It works. Uses a lot of power, though, and our generators sometimes aren't up to it. Cuts out every now and then, especially if we keep it running for more than half an hour or so. We just don't have the infrastructure that the portal building does."

"Could you move somewhere more defensible?" Roy asked. "The portal building would be ideal, of course, but--"

"Yeah, no one can get in there, you saw that. Can't really move anywhere else, either, even if there was somewhere to go; the infected would catch us before we got where we were going. Their minds aren't quite right anymore, y'see; they forget about us quick enough once we're out of sight, but out there on the streets? Only way any of us get around out there is by going one at a time and moving fast, and even then--" Cid shook his head. "It doesn't always work out."

"Who raised the barrier around the portal?" Vincent asked.

"Last ones to leave, I guess. I would've done the same with those things on my heels."

"Seems cruel of them to have blocked off the only means of escape from this world," Basch commented.

"No, I'm not arguin' that, actually," Cid replied, sounding surprisingly calm. "If that was the only way to stop the virus from spreading? I can't say I would've done any different." He shrugged. "I could probably get the barrier to come down safe if I was inside, but from out here? Not without breaking it for good. So really, this is about the safest place we could be.

"But y'know, I think the real reason why we stay here--" He led them to another door, a big metal thing with a sign on it that Roy didn't have time to read before Cid opened it. His smug, proud grin only widened when they stepped through and gasped. "Well, it'd be a bit hard to move this, don't you think?"

Roy knew his eyes were wide as he stared down into the deep silo, and at what had to be a rocket resting inside it. "What is it?"

"Hopefully," Cid said, "our way out of here."


	9. Chapter 9

Squall managed to wrench free of Seifer's grip as they were all but pushed through a door; one or the other of them kicked it closed behind them. It went back and forth between them after that, reach and block and lunge, only this time when it came to the end of it Squall found himself in possession of the upper hand.

Seifer made some comment that Squall didn't really hear, but wasn't actually protesting too much when Squall kicked his legs out from under him and followed down to grind him into the floor. Seifer would have bruises later, from the impact of his shoulders, from the grip of Squall's fingers; Squall found a smug kind of satisfaction in that, and in the darkly purple spot already swelling slightly on Seifer's throat.

Fastening his mouth to that spot again, Squall just kept moving until all of the tension between them snapped and bled away.

As he was levering to his feet again after, though, the satisfaction started to fade into something-- uncertain. Squall felt unaccountably twitchy without his shirt; Seifer managed to look all the more intimidating without his. Squall couldn't manage to look at him for more than a second at a time, something that Seifer had to have noticed but for whatever reason decided not to comment on. And Squall tried hard not to feel _grateful_ for that, but wasn't sure he succeeded; mostly he was uncomfortably aware that something between them was shifting, changing under the constant pressure of that gods-be-damned bond.

He was even more uncomfortably aware that he wasn't sure he was all that upset about it-- the constant strain of things they way they were was exhausting.

He was reaching for his belt when Seifer, with that infuriating poking-at-anthills grin, leaned in close enough to murmur right next to Squall's ear. "So, what if I wanted to fuck you?"

Squall froze, blinking once. "What?" he managed, taking a few steps back.

"You heard me," Seifer replied easily. "Come on, don't tell me you haven't thought about it. I even promise to make you like it."

Squall met the look with a challenging bare of teeth. "What if I wanted to fuck _you_?"

He'd expected-- indignation, anger, some kind of macho bullshit posturing. Instead, he just got more of that predator smile. "I s'pose we can negotiate. If you think you can handle me." Seifer lifted both hands to push back his hair, bringing the muscles in his chest and shoulders into sharp relief, and his eyes never left Squall's the whole time.

Squall was caught looking, and for a moment couldn't look away. His fingers, in the middle of fastening his belt, just sort of fiddled there aimlessly-- which was where, he noticed after a second, Seifer's own eyes seemed to get caught.

Snarling against the sudden shaky feeling in his chest, Squall grabbed up his shirt and yanked it on, jerking the door open and leaving Seifer behind before any part of him could think better of it.

***

Luke lay against Guy, sticky and breathing hard. He wasn't terribly comfortable-- they were crammed onto a little narrow cot that obviously hadn't been intended for two, and he was pretty sure his right foot was falling asleep. But honestly, it was still enough of a bed to be a novelty, and it was _there_ , so, good enough.

No, for the most part Luke was pretty content, but he eventually couldn't put off remembering that they'd had an audience out in the hallway. "We keep making really great first impressions, don't we," he said sourly.

Guy laughed quietly, shaking his head.

"Mm." Luke shifted so he was propped up a bit instead of sprawled all over Guy-- well, sprawled as _much_. It was a _really_ narrow cot. He mostly just wedged his elbow against the wall and levered up until he could see over Guy's shoulder. He considered their little room, nothing but four walls and a battered bench and the bed, and then he considered the fact that if they went outside they would have to face the strangers they had nearly had sex in front of. He considered their little room again, and its firmly closed door.

"Um," he said, looking sidelong at Guy. "Again?"

Guy gave him a slow smile then leaned up, his hand sliding into Luke's hair.

It was rare enough that they had the time to linger, not when it really mattered-- they took the time when they had it, of course, but that never seemed to be a possibility when the need was clawing at them the hardest. Privacy had been even harder to come by since they had left Choral Castle in such a large group.

And yeah, they probably _should_ have gone back out to talk business and all, but Luke really didn't have any urge to do that just yet. It was a good enough excuse as any to take their time, and if it would help him get rid of the last lingering shakiness in him, then all the better. It had been their first real brush with danger, after all-- not that the portal guards with their guns hadn't been dangerous, but those _things_ out there were in an entirely different category. Seeing them had shaken him on a level that the other threats so far hadn't really touched. So maybe there was a little part of him that wanted to make good and sure that Guy was right there and all right.

They didn't really move, just settled back in on their sides with their fingers wrapped around both of them together, coming up for air when they needed to but mostly just kissing in a long, steady press. They moved in time with each other by instinct, probably due more to knowing each other for so long than any effect of the bond. But as their hands moved with a slow, persistent pressure, Luke reached for that anyway, reached for the sense of _Guy_ that was always tickling at the edge of his consciousness and tried to wrap himself around it.

They came at the same time, Luke feeling the hot burst of pleasure in Guy's head as well as his own. The force of the combined orgasm left him gasping and wrung out, every muscle trembling faintly.

"Think anyone'll care if we take a nap?" he said when he could manage it.

"Nn," Guy grunted, already nosing into Luke's shoulder, his eyes closed.

"Oh," Luke said faintly, letting himself drift. "Good."

***

Their pairs slowly trickled back to them from their convenient nooks, looking flushed and mussed and much calmer-- and varying degrees of embarrassed, but when none of the natives made a fuss about it they slowly relaxed. Vincent saw Basch take each pair aside as they emerged and fill them in on the latest developments; saw Roy give an exaggeratedly relieved roll of his eyes at not having to explain, himself. Vincent just shook his head and waited.

They all somehow ended up back in that silo, looking down at the rocket in its nest of cables and struts and scaffolding. "So okay," Seifer said. "If you guys've got this thing, why the hell aren't you long gone from this shithole?"

Cid gave him a narrow look, but his constant gnawing on that stick in his mouth paused. "It doesn't quite work yet," he answered grudgingly. "Engine needs a part."

"And?"

" _And_ , we don't have it," Cid ground out. "Why do you think I was risking my neck out there? I was trying to get to my workshop, only for some reason it's usually surrounded by a few _hundred_ infected." He shook his head, visibly frustrated. "It's like they know, somehow. I've been keepin' an eye on the place for months now and they just never leave. If they weren't so bloody stupid the rest of the time, I'd wonder--"

He huffed again, then gave them a speculative look. "But hey, with you guys here, maybe we got a chance. After all, y'all are pretty much custom designed to fight them. So here's the deal," Cid finished, with a sharp grin, "you get us what we need, we give you a lift back to civilization."

"Or?" Squall asked narrowly. Vincent had to agree with his tone-- he didn't like being threatened, either.

Cid just gave them a shrug. "Or you stay here and die slow like the rest of us, I don't much care. Your choice."

"Not much of one," David said mildly.

Cid's grin didn't twitch. "'S all I got to offer. Gettin' pissy about it ain't gonna change a thing."

The stalemate held for a moment, until David inclined his head minutely and stepped forward. "Do you have a map to this workshop of yours?"

***

When they ventured back out onto the streets, the sound of the gate shutting behind them was very loud and very final, and Squall couldn't quite help the way he stiffened and glanced back over his shoulder. A few of the others visibly flinched, nerves twanging at the sound. They spread out warily, all eyes trained outwards, although the mob of infected seemed to have vanished as completely as Cid had said it would.

"Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll all be somewhere else?" Rush whispered.

"Unlikely," David murmured back, dryly. And as if to prove the point, there was a scrape from a side street and a flicker of motion that had them all immediately on guard, falling in to a defensive formation. By unspoken consensus they moved a little faster, arrowing forward on the path laid out by Cid's map, struggling against the sense of a trap closing around them.

They were no more than a few blocks away from their goal when they rounded a corner to find a solid mass of bodies blocking the way ahead. As one, the infected turned towards them, faces blank and joints held all wrong. As one, they stepped forward, then again, lurching into a run that had them crashing into Squall's blocking swing with enough force to push him back several feet.

"Shit!" someone shouted-- Squall wasn't sure who, and wasn't sure it mattered since they were probably all thinking it but just couldn't spare the breath to say it out loud. He pushed forward viciously, feeling the edge of his gunblade bite flesh, shoved again and got just enough space to pull back and fire a round into the nearest front.

Seifer dodged forward into the hole that that created, swinging in a wide, unstoppable arc and cutting down at least a dozen more before the press of bodies became too much again. They fell back shoulder to shoulder, then, holding the line and waiting for another chance.

They kept inching forward like that-- the lot of them formed up into a wedge, taking advantage of openings as they presented themselves-- and it went on long enough that Squall was momentarily surprised when they finally hit up against the wall of the building they'd been aiming for. Squall stayed outside with most of the others, braced there while a few broke off and went inside to actually get what they'd come for.

For all that the infected really did seem lacking in the intelligence department, they still appeared to know that something was up at that. As soon as the advance party forced the door and vanished inside, the press of bodies redoubled as the infected attempted to go after them.

Squall winced as something in him twinged, and he turned to find Seifer five paces away and still moving. Squall stepped in and cut down the staggering shape trying to wedge its way between them-- growled and went after the next two as well, pulled along as instinct made him hyperaware of exactly how far away from him Seifer was at that moment. "Formation," he snapped when he could spare the breath.

"Yeah, yeah," Seifer growled in reply. He started stepping back towards the main group, one inched heel at a time.

Not fast enough, though-- Squall growled again and started forward himself, not really wanting to leave the line but unable to stop himself. He grunted as he was jostled from behind-- grunted again as his heel hit something unsteady and nearly went out from under him. It was stupid, it was random, and it was just what it took to make him stumble long enough for one of the infected creatures to get inside his guard and rake crooked fingers across his stomach. It _burned_ , like the thing had talons instead of fingers, and Squall heard himself give a hurt little sound despite himself.

From not too far away, he heard Seifer let out a wild howl, rage and challenge and something like panic all rolled up into one. The infected's head literally exploded even as Squall watched, caved in and scattered by the force of a gunblade's impact. "Fuckin' idiot," Seifer was bellowing, "too stupid to watch your fucking back, what are you, a rookie?" Except that he was still pushing the wave back while Squall got his feet back under him and tried to unfold his body from the instinctive curl it had taken. He touched his stomach and had his hand come away wet; his shoulders wanted to stay hunched against the burn.

He still squared himself and lunged to take out the infected just lifting a hand as if to hamstring Seifer from behind. "I could say the same," he rasped. He tried to go for another only to find Seifer in the way. "Get out of my way, I don't need your help."

"Stop being such a stubborn asshole," Seifer gritted back, but he did move aside, just enough that Squall could come up by his shoulder.

It all blurred from there. Squall was distantly aware when the others returned carrying something ridiculously small wrapped up in a scrap of tarp, because that was when they left the dubious shelter of the wall and started to work back towards the compound. They ran when they could and fought when they had to-- which was more and more often, because it seemed like every infected in the entire city had been mustered to bear down on them. And maybe it was exhaustion or the wound wearing him down, but Squall got hit a few more times before Cid's fortified walls came into view. The infected always went for the guts, like some animal instinct, creating little stars of pain that prickled at him each time he moved. Though honestly, he wasn't sure all of them were his; one side of Seifer's face was washed red when Squall happened to catch glimpse of it, and there was a certain feral desperation to Seifer's eyes.

Cid's voice shouted something at them-- and then from overhead came a roaring rush and a high-powered stream of sand, speckling them with grit as it ate into the line of massed bodies behind them. They staggered to a halt as heavy metal doors clanged shut behind them, methodically cutting down the few infected that had managed to follow them in.

The hum of the shields coming up, muted through the walls but still audible, was one of the sweetest sounds Squall had ever heard.

And it seemed to be the cue for his remaining strength to drain out of him, making his knees buckle. He heard Seifer curse even as arms caught at him, keeping him from hitting the ground with too much force.

Squall finally looked down at himself and couldn't help but shudder at the sheer extent of red staining his clothing, at how little was left of his shirt-- his enhanced healing at least meant he wasn't bleeding anymore, at least not on the surface, but he certainly had been for quite some time.

"They're not backin' off this time," was Cid's grim greeting when they cycled out of decontamination. "At this rate, I don't know how long the barrier's gonna hold."

"How long will it take to get the rocket ready?" David asked, handing over the part.

"Not long," Cid answered, determined, though he cast an uneasy look at the gate, beyond which could be heard a muted kind of rumble, and at the shield generator which was starting to give a faint mechanical whine. "Everything should be set, just gotta wire this in. Everyone else is already aboard," he added, and Jade flashed a thin smile.

"Ready for anything, I see. Then I suggest we join them."

Seifer grumbled at him as they made their way towards the ship, a constant low stream of curses and insults that Squall let wash over and past him. The ladders were agony, pulling at all the damaged muscles in his midsection, but Seifer's hand was on his back to steady him. It was somehow different-- something between them had changed again, only he didn't have the energy to figure out what.

He stumbled at the top of the last ladder. Seifer caught his arm, and Squall let him.

***

Cloud had known, in an abstract sort of way, how they would have to travel if they went by starship. He'd never been a rocket enthusiast, not like a couple of the guys in his squad, but he had followed the developments in a distantly curious sort of way. The presence of the portals meant that there had never been much of a need for space travel and its unfortunate side effects-- namely, how a person would die of old age in the course of the trip unless they went superlight, and going that fast did strange things to people's heads. Rocket travel had mostly been an issue for large-item shipments, things that didn't fit easily through portals or were deemed too dangerous, and for those who were obsessed with seeing the stars.

In the abstract, therefore, he'd known that he would have to be put into stasis once they were on board, since that was the only viable way for a person to journey between worlds without a portal. It would still probably take years to get where they were going, and that was if Cid's jury-rigged rocket didn't break down in the process. But Cloud supposed that a little more lost time wouldn't make much difference for him, all things considered. In the abstract, the idea didn't bother him any more than anything else.

He hadn't imagined the actual stasis modules, though. When he topped the ladder and moved into the corridor beyond and saw the narrow doors leading to the low, padded rooms, it was only the body behind his that stopped him from stumbling right back out the door.

"No," he heard someone say, just a breath at first but escalating. "No, no, no--"

When the voice broke in his own tight throat, he realized that it was him.

People jumped forward to catch him as he jerked backwards, but there was only so much room in the corridor. He ran into someone, heard Squall grunt at the impact and Seifer growl warningly a second later. The smell of blood was everywhere.

"We do not have time for this," Jade's voice snapped. "Someone grab his arms."

No. Not again.

 _The sharp slide of needles, burning cold as whatever it was spread through him, and he thrashed, trying and failing to dislodge the tubes. Heavy grips on his shoulders-- not even hands, not anything so human, just cold metal-- holding him down until his strength and will left him._

Please--

It was Vincent who finally got a firm enough hold on Cloud to immobilize him-- Vincent, who looked enough like Zack to draw him out of his sleep but never close enough to matter. He could almost hate the man for that, a little.

Vincent started shoving Cloud towards a waiting hatch, using his height advantage to keep Cloud off balance. Vincent shook him firmly when Cloud managed to brace a foot outside the door and push back, and Cloud twisted his neck around to look at him. His eyes were burning, watering a little; he saw that black hair and something in him twisted. "Don't," he whispered.

"Think of it," Vincent murmured, "as if you are simply going to sleep."

 _Can't. Can't do that, Zack didn't want--_

Cloud's eyes fixed on the little doorway that they wanted him to go into. It only bore a superficial resemblance to the ones they'd been held in, it was padded like a couch inside and obviously intended to be comfortable. There was no gleaming metal, no wires, no bitter stench of mako.

It didn't matter.

Someone else grabbed his legs, a third helped Vincent pin his upper body, and together they got him inside the narrow space. Cloud gasped in short little pants, not able to get enough breath, not enough _air_ and any minute there would be none at all-- his fingers went white as he twisted to press them against the plastiglass in the door, trying to keep it from closing even though he knew it had to. He saw Vincent's fingers moving on the controls outside and then there was a flash and then--

 _Shh, Cloud. Hang on, all right? Just hang on, we'll get out of this yet._

Nothing at all.


	10. Chapter 10

Gettin' off the ship was even more fun than gettin' on, because even though he'd spent the trip apparently suspended in time, somehow his body had still managed to stiffen up all over. And Squall was still walkin' hunched over like an old man, one arm wrapped tight around his guts like he was afraid they were gonna fall out-- not that Seifer hadn't thought about that, himself, at one point, seein' just how much blood had been involved.

At least the stupid, stubborn bastard was letting him help, this time. It was too bad that the long trip hadn't let them heal while they were at it-- but he supposed the whole point of _stasis_ was that while you were in it, time didn't pass.

Seifer must have been getting numb to the way time'd been continually screwed up around them, though, because it barely seemed to matter that it was probably a few _years_ later than what felt like five minutes before. Of course, that might have had something to do with Squall, white as a sheet and kind of staggering as he left the ship behind, and the way Seifer couldn't quite stop hovering right beside him. He heard some exasperated sighs from the others as they bickered back and forth, Squall's voice gritty and tight and his own too-loud to compensate, but he couldn't really spare the attention to tell them to fuck off and mind their own business.

"All right, listen up," Cid barked from somewhere further back in the line-- the man had a set of lungs that their old drill sergeant would envy. There were milling civilians coming out of their stasis chambers, now, looking around with blank, relieved expressions, and all of them turned at the sound. "There's no way people didn't see us comin' in, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone came along pretty soon to investigate. I don't imagine they get many rockets in these parts." There was a low, tentative laugh. "If we are where the charts say we are," Cid went on when it was done, "there's a town not too far that way." He pointed, and the sea of heads turned to follow. "Let's go find somewhere to hole up before we get too into celebratin'."

Seifer was all but carrying Squall by the time they got where they were going-- a ghost town, not a soul to be seen, and most of the buildings showing their years, but that actually suited him just fine. He picked a building at random, leaving the rest behind without a word, and went to find a place for Squall to lie down and finish healing.

Once he got Squall settled on a horizontal surface, Seifer peeled back the wadded up remains of Squall's shirt-- all the bandage they'd really had time for-- and assessed what was beneath. The edges of the wounds were mostly closed over but looked white and bloodless, swollen, not entirely right-- maybe something to do with why they were healing slower than they should've been. But they didn't smell and didn't really look like they were poisoned, so he just sponged them off and rebound them with something a little cleaner.

Squall stared at him the entire time, looking a bit like he wanted to tell Seifer off but mostly like he wasn't really sure what the fuck was going on. Seifer sympathized; he mostly felt like that, himself.

When he finished, Seifer laid a hand over the bandage, feeling the rise and fall of the flesh beneath as Squall breathed and feeling something in himself starting to relax at the same time. "This," he said succinctly, breaking the silence, "is so completely fucked up."

And he leaned down-- didn't quite _kiss_ Squall, that would have been pushing it. But he touched his lips to Squall's temple, nosed his hair and inhaled, helpless not to. Finally, reluctantly admitting to the stupid shaky feeling that still wouldn't quite go away, and the urge to reassure himself that despite everything, the dumbass was still alive.

Squall's hand slowly lifted to close around Seifer's sleeve, and then slid up to rest just below his hairline. It curled there, cool but not uncomfortable, and stayed.

***

It might have been the next morning, or the morning after that-- long enough that their strange little band of refugees had started to settle out and get used to the idea that they were alive and free. The people Guy passed in the street were smiling at each other as they took stock and began to start over. Most of them looked at Luke and him in a kind of wary awe, which was-- uncomfortable, at best, but that would probably fade over time, and for the most part the atmosphere was hopeful.

It had been long enough that Guy had actually slept until he didn't feel tired, anyway, and long enough for the gash on Luke's leg to heal to the point where he wasn't limping anymore. The two of them wandered into what appeared to have become their base of operations, the place where everyone had centralized all their supplies, and there they found Cid bending over a pot on some kind of portable cookstove. Roy was already seated at a table to one side, a cup cradled in both hands.

When they got close enough, Cid handed them battered mugs filled with steaming dark liquid. "Tea," he grunted.

"Don't suppose there's coffee?" Luke asked hopefully.

Cid scowled, still looking grumpy with sleep. "You'll drink your damned tea and like it."

Luke blinked, and took the cup. "Yes sir."

Cid grunted at them again and wandered away.

"So where are we?" Yuri's voice said from behind; Guy turned to see him and Flynn just coming in, Flynn muffling a yawn with one hand. Yuri was still holding his arm a little awkwardly, but considering that Guy was pretty sure he hadn't been able to _move_ it after the battle, that was pretty good. He wondered how Squall was doing; he'd looked pretty bad, and the way that Seifer had been practically glued to his side couldn't have meant anything good.

"Somewhere in western Archades, it seems," Roy answered, gesturing at some sort of map on the table in front of him.

Guy wandered over to look, absently sipping from his mug-- and he froze in place, coughing helplessly with the edge of it still touching his lips. It-- might have been tea, yes, and it would no doubt serve the purpose of waking him up, but--

Roy smirked at him from overtop of his own mug, which looked suspiciously full.

Yuri, watching, set his cup at the end of the table and left it there, before bending to peer at the map. "Hunh. Certainly seeing the world, these days." He glanced over to the other side of the room, where Guy belatedly noticed Jade hunched over their datascreen and a whole lot of other equipment besides. "What's the genius doing?"

"Going through the sensor logs from the ship," Roy explained blandly. "Cid apparently set up an entire array of recording devices on it. I suppose that since he had to miss the trip while in stasis, he wanted to be able to experience it all at a later date."

Luke blinked, daring a sidelong glance at a still-scowling Cid. "So, what's Jade doing with it?"

Roy shrugged. "How should I know? Maybe he's secretly as much of a space enthusiast as Cid."

They sat and _didn't_ drink their tea while the others began to trickle in. Guy looked at each of them in turn, seeing the traces of weariness, of hurt-- Squall looked pale but was walking all right by himself. The only one looking remotely refreshed was Kimberly, which was-- both unsurprising and unreassuring. Roy's repeated warnings about Kimberly had always sounded a little paranoid, but Guy had to admit that there was something deeply unsettling about the man.

"So it was real, then," Flynn eventually said in a sober tone, breaking into the subject that none of them had really wanted to broach but which couldn't be avoided forever. "Alien viruses and all."

Seifer snorted, sprawled out all over one end of the bench. "Think that's pretty obvious by now, don't you?"

Rush made a low, frustrated sound. "But how are fifteen of us supposed to fight a million alien-virus-ridden super-powered freaks? Maybe if everyone in the program had survived we'd have a chance, but now?"

"You have obviously never fought a war," Jade said distractedly, wandering over to join them with his eyes still fixed on the 'screen. "Your target is never the foot soldiers, it's the general leading them. Otherwise you're left killing cannon fodder all day to no real use." His fingers darted on the controls and the screen flashed, images and text moving by in rapid succession.

"Well that's, uh, great, but unless you've got some plan to let us fight this JENOVA directly--" Luke cut himself off, eyeing Jade's intent look with suspicion. "What am I talking about, of course you do."

"Hm," was all Jade said, and Guy rolled his eyes.

"Back the fuck up, here," Seifer interrupted. "Who says we've gotta fight anything? We got away, the freaks are all sealed up in their own little hell, let's just leave it the fuck alone."

"'Cept that virus got to my world somehow," Cid said, coming to join them, looking a little more awake. "Didn't need any kind of human carrier. What's to say it won't spread to the others the same way?"

It was a sobering thought, and one that left the entire table silent for long moments. Because it was true-- from Cid's account of things, the virus had shown up unexpectedly, brought directly by the source, JENOVA. It could very well do the same elsewhere.

For all they knew, it could already have arrived.

Guy glanced at Jade, who showed no sign of being ready to share his schemes, so he cleared his throat and changed the subject instead. "Anyone gone out to scavenge the town yet?" Cid shrugged.

"Few groups went around, didn't find much. Expect the locals took whatever they could carry with them when they left." He took a long, thoughtful pull from his mug, and Guy wasn't the only one who shuddered to see it. "There's some mechanical stuff," he added, "not in very good shape but I'm gonna go round it up later and see what I can do with it. Who knows, maybe I can whip us up a water filtration unit or something."

The conversation devolved from there into discussions of what Cid could and couldn't build-- with the former apparently far more frequent than the latter. Guy couldn't help but perk up when he started talking about engines, and he heard a muffled snicker from Luke over it.

"Ah," Jade said suddenly, and all other conversation fell silent. "There you are."

"You ready to share with the class now, professor?" Yuri asked dryly.

Jade quirked an eyebrow at him, but didn't otherwise comment. "You may recall," he began, "that we found coordinates of some kind amongst the data from the last facility we visited. Only they didn't correlate with any kind of navigational system that I was familiar with."

"Yeah, so?"

"So," Jade said blandly, "I believe I have figured them out."

He set the datascreen down, and Guy saw that it was paused on image that could only have been taken from the rocket-- an aerial image of a world, blue and green and grey. Jade tapped the screen, and the image began to zoom in until they could start to see the outlines of cities and landforms. "They were not coordinates at all," Jade said quietly. "Or rather, not _only_ coordinates. The sequence of numbers included a date and time stamp and some manner of trajectory calculation which, when followed through to its logical conclusion, leads here."

He zoomed in one last time, leaving the 'screen showing the vaguely circular outline of a crater-- and at the center of it, some dark and irregular shape, something big and amorphous and dark, oily blue.

"You think that's--" Rush started, then had to stop and blink at the screen a few more times. "JENOVA? Like, the actual alien itself, sitting in there calling the shots?"

Jade gave a slow shrug. "It would explain how the infected act more like puppets than people."

"That's pretty fucking thin," Squall muttered.

"So what do we do, then?" Yuri asked.

Jade tapped the 'screen again, zooming out to a more general view. "Take the fight to the general, of course. The crater is only several hours' travel north of the city, if we can find a working transport vehicle. Unless someone has a better idea?"

"Yeah," Seifer said without much hope, "we all go back to th' damned beach, drink a lot of booze out of coconuts or some shit, and forget about the whole thing."

Jade sighed. "Under any other circumstances," he said, with surprising candour, "I might agree with you. However, this is not just a matter of some greedy lord's struggle for power, this is the potential eradication of the human race. And though I have on occasion been accused of being cold, that is not something I want on my conscience."

"First we will have to resupply and prepare," David said quietly. "Repair our weaponry and perhaps acquire more."

"I'm good with more," Yuri muttered.

"It will take a portal to get us back," David continued. "With any luck, the infected will be ignoring the portal in favour of whatever remains of the compound, so we may be able to act with some element of surprise, at least at first."

" _Act_ , how? Seriously, no one's said yet what exactly we're supposed t'do," Seifer said incredulously. "I ain't too happy with the idea of takin' on a giant fucking alien with a sword."

"Here," Jade said. He tapped through several sequences on the datascreen, making the display pan down and then over a plan of the city. "There were once several advanced military development laboratories in the city. This one, at least," Jade went on, finally zeroing in on one building in particular, "was noted to be under high security, the same sort of barrier system as was placed around the portal. There's a very good chance that the infected would not have been able to get inside to destroy any of the equipment."

"If it's under a barrier, how will we get inside?" Basch asked quietly.

"I can get you through it, if you don't care too much about puttin' it back up again when you're done. And I can probably get you back home again after you're finished," Cid said grudgingly. "If I go through the portal with you, so long as I don't go outside the barrier then I can work with the controls from the inside. If you make it and actually beat the freaks, I can get the barrier to drop and let you back through."

"And if we don't?"

"Well, at least I can get out, myself. And I'll make sure to hold a nice memorial service for you."

***

It took entirely too little time for them to take stock of their weaponry and other gear-- Roy felt a pang for the armory they'd left behind Balamb, as he was reduced to scavenging basements for rusty knives. Far too late to go back, of course; the most they could do was clean and sharpen their existing weapons until they gleamed, and hope for better when they reached Jade's theoretical military depot. _If_ they reached it.

The entire settlement had that quiet, heavy feeling that came before a battle. The nearest portal had already been located; they would be setting out in the morning. Predictably enough, all of their pairs had gone off for some alone time when that decision was made, leaving the rest of them to their own devices. Not that they had done much more than pack their kits and prepare, although Kimberly had been pretty quick to vanish. Roy didn't know what the man was up to, and since there had not yet been any explosions, for once he was determined not to care.

For the most part, Roy just wanted a drink. It wasn't like his enhanced metabolism would let him be hung over for the big day. So once he felt he was suitably prepared-- rations, check; water, check; bandages, check-- he hunted down what had once been the town's bar. The cellar was securely barred and padlocked even after so many years, but it was only a slight effort on his part to break through. Collecting a random selection of dusty bottles, he brought them back up into the light.

Jade was already upstairs, righting one of the barroom's intact tables and dragging over several battered chairs to match. There wasn't anything so civilized as a glass in sight, of course, but this once Roy thought he could manage without.

Jade took the first bottle wordlessly when Roy offered it. Roy still didn't know if he _liked_ the man, but they had spent a lot of time together travelling through various parts of Trabia in the early days, so at least he was familiar. And he didn't feel the need to talk, just tipped the bottle to his lips and drank, which Roy did appreciate.

Footsteps heralded Basch and then Auron as the two men eventually wandered in to join them. And when the first bottle emptied, they started on the next.

***

Vincent eventually hunted Cloud down on the outskirts of their adopted town, leaning back against a partly tumbled wall and staring out into the night. It was a vague sense of obligation that brought him, at least in part, wanting to ensure that the man hadn't suffered some sort of relapse to his earlier condition, or wouldn't become a liability in the upcoming battle. The rest of it-- it wasn't _concern_ , precisely, but Vincent supposed it was close.

Cloud didn't look up at as Vincent drew near, just stayed slumped against the wall, wearing a hooded expression. But he had obviously noticed the approach because he spoke the moment Vincent stopped moving. "Somehow, I thought you'd be by."

Vincent studied Cloud briefly. He had been very quiet since emerging from the stasis capsule-- quite the change from the wild-eyed creature they had needed to wrestle into it, who had looked back out at them with a bloodless, terrified expression. But the change went deeper than that, Vincent thought. There had always been a tense current of something like madness running through Cloud, but now he seemed more grounded, quietly thoughtful instead of merely numb. Maybe facing down some of his demons had let Cloud exorcise them-- it was impossible to say for certain, and Vincent doubted it was a method any of them would willingly choose, but the results did seem to be there.

He stepped in close enough to speak and matched Cloud's posture, looking out into the night. "I apologize," he said stiffly, "for my actions on the ship."

Cloud shrugged. "You did what you had to do," he said flatly. "I know that."

"Nonetheless. I-- regret it came to that."

Cloud gave a faint snort, glancing at him sidelong. "It's hardly your fault that I remember too much. Though I suppose I appreciate the sentiment."

"You do remember, then," Vincent asked. "I know some of the others suspected as much."

Cloud shrugged again. "I never saw any point in mentioning it, it's not like I had any answers for you. The ones who did it never said why; they hardly said anything to us at all, like we were just-- things. Subjects. I don't think they ever referred to either of us by name.

"You look kind of like him," Cloud added suddenly. "Like-- Zack. Not a lot, but enough, I guess. In case you were wondering why."

"Ah," Vincent said quietly.

"I used to think you were lucky, you know. Not as much as the others who were still together, but at least the ones like you would never know what it felt like to-- you wouldn't ever have to live through that. But I suppose, in a way, at least I got to say good-bye."

Vincent thought back-- to the last parts of his old life that he could remember, the long days of waiting in some minor lord's prison after failing to kill him, the occasional scratch of motion from the next cell over that was the only indication his partner was still alive. He thought about the very real possibility that he could have woken from his long sleep to the same sort of need and dependence that plagued Cloud and those like him, and tried to imagine it being worth the trouble.

And then he shook his head. He and Tseng had been colleagues, not lovers, not even friends. He doubted he could really understand.

Cloud's unexpected willingness to talk seemed to have ended, so Vincent stood for a few more moments of fairly companionable silence and then moved away. He walked the town's perimeter from old habit, studying the shadows and listening to the faint sounds that drifted by.

A curl of motion caught his eye; he turned and found Cid perched on a stump, smoking. "Forgot what the air was like, really," the man said by way of greeting, as Vincent approached. "Everything smells good, here."

Vincent gave a pointed cough at the waft of smoke that came his way. "Yes, of course," he said dryly.

Cid shot him a crooked little smirk. "Forgot what this was like, too," he said then, waving the cigarette. "We ran out of these a long while back, but I never quite stopped wanting one."

"And how many houses did you have to search to find that?"

"A few," Cid answered, cigarette pinched in the midst of a wide grin.

"You don't have to go back, you know," Vincent felt obliged to offer after a few moments of silence.

"You don't either," Cid shot back. "Could just let 'em all rot up there. Won't matter any to us if that shit breaks loose in fifty years."

"I suppose not," Vincent agreed mildly. And after a moment's more silence Cid barked a laugh and stood to clap him on the shoulder.

"Got that right," he said, and walked off into the night.

***

Of course he knew that Seifer was following him. He could hardly _not_ know, these days, but he wasn't quite ready to admit that he knew why, or that he was maybe looking forward to it a little. He just kept walking, right up to the room that they'd claimed and inside. When the door clicked shut, he was ready, catching the hand that Seifer was already reaching towards him and using it to spin the other man into an armlock. Seifer growled, low and resonant, and it was on.

They wrestled as seriously as they'd ever done on the practice mats, gaining more than a few bruises in the process. It was luck as much as anything that put Squall's shoulders to the floor at the end of it, with Seifer overtop of him, grinning down in obvious challenge.

Squall tensed against the hold, grunting when it gained him nothing. "Whatever," he eventually said, reluctantly admitting the defeat. "But don't think this means anything for next time."

Seifer's grin only widened, though Squall for once had the impression that it wasn't meant to mock. Squall met Seifer's descending mouth with a deliberate scrape of teeth, to which Seifer at first jerked and then returned kind for kind, purring a low sound under his breath. They grappled with each other as they moved from the floor to the bed, fingers digging, hips bucking, pulling at clothing until they had to break apart to take the rest of it off. When they came back together it was a shocking sear of naked skin on skin, which paradoxically had Squall shivering.

Seifer tossed a small flask of oil down beside them; Squall didn't ask where he'd got it, and was pretty sure he didn't want to know. He just waited, and sure enough after bare seconds Seifer sank two fingers in without warning, prompting Squall to make a sound half growl, half moan; he just couldn't help it. Seifer echoed the sound with a growl of his own.

"Oh, fuck, that's good," he heard Seifer mutter. "Fuck, Squall--" He laughed breathlessly. "Not so cold after all."

"Shut up," Squall ground out. "Why do you never _shut up_." He grabbed a handful of hair and yanked until Seifer's words cut off in a pained hiss, and then made sure of it by stoppering up Seifer's mouth with his own.

He was expecting Seifer to just shove it in, to fuck him hard and fast, so the slow push and easy thrust that he got instead threw him off balance. He found himself only able to lie there and blink vaguely at nothing until Seifer buried his face in Squall's shoulder and started muttering broken curses, buried as deep as he could go. Those broad shoulders were shaking, his hands were clenched.

Hesitantly, Squall brought his arms up-- like all of those uninvited new instincts were demanding he do-- and slid them slowly over and down Seifer's back, prompting another shiver. Seifer's hips moved; one of his hands came down to Squall's hip, wrapping over the bone, bracing, holding, and the next slow thrust took Squall right where it counted the most.

He threw his head back on a muffled shout, nails digging into skin. Seifer made another of those low, thrumming sounds, hot and pleased, and did it again.

When it ended both of them lay shaking, slow to recover, Squall bonelessly warm and flat on his back, Seifer a dead weight against his chest and side. A dead weight that quivered once, then eventually propped itself up on an elbow and began to laugh, helpless and more genuine than Squall had ever seen. "Fuck," he said, "why haven't we done this before?"

"Because you're an arrogant asshole?" Squall answered automatically, though he had trouble working up any real venom to the words.

"Yeah, well," Seifer shot back, still amused, "you're a frigid little bitch, so."

Squall slitted his eyes open, thought about taking offense, and decided that it was too much effort. And besides, he supposed-- he felt his mouth quirk up at the corners as he tipped his head, conceding the point.

Seifer stared, then his face split in a wide grin. "Fuck me sideways, I think the ice princess just melted." Seifer laughed again, and Squall just lay there feeling strangely light until the body against his stopped shaking and settled half over him like a blanket instead.

Then, feeling more at peace than he had since before any of this had started, Squall slept.


	11. Chapter 11

"This is too easy," Yuri muttered, and Luke really couldn't help but agree. "Where the hell are they?"

"Best not to question," Jade murmured back absently; most of his attention was on the device in his hands. Cid's disruptor was a lot smaller than Luke had expected it to be, not quite as big as a fist. Supposedly, though, it would do the job of stopping the generators that maintained the barrier, so long as they could find the right frequency, or something.

Jade had been at it for a few minutes already, holding the little device up against the smooth, invisible surface of the barrier, and so far nothing had happened that Luke could see. And everything around them was _far_ too quiet; he kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

They hadn't seen a single infected in the entire time it had taken them to work through the city and reach this supposed top military research facility. Not so much as a whisper of movement, which somehow made the ruins seem even creepier. And yeah, technically, not having to fight their way in was a _good_ thing, but mostly it just made Luke wonder where their enemies were waiting for them and how many of them there would be when they finally did attack. The constant waiting and the jumping at shadows was fraying his nerves at a really incredible rate.

"Ah," Jade said at last. "That seems to have done something."

The shiver of concussion reached them before the cloud of dust began to lift off one of the buildings inside the barrier, the dull _whump_ of the explosion muffled by layers of concrete. Under Jade's hand, the barrier went down with a dull violet ripple.

"Great," Rush said, starting in. "Let's just hope that didn't fry whatever we came here to get."

"I doubt the top-secret experimental weaponry and stockpiles of explosive material were kept in the same room as the power generators," Yuri replied in a drawl.

"Hey, never underestimate the power of bureaucratic stupidity."

They took a few wrong turns inside the vast complex before they found what they were looking for: a series of huge, warehouse-style rooms filled with shelves and bins and benches that were all loaded down with equipment. Luke stared at it all with a vague sinking sensation. "How are we supposed to sort through all of this?"

Yuri pulled down a stack of papers from the nearest shelf, his eyebrows raising. "Conveniently enough, there's a catalogue. Complete with index numbers for blueprints and instruction manuals." He laughed. "I guess bureaucracy has its benefits after all. Never thought I'd be saying this, but let's hear it for forms in triplicate."

"If this is correct, there should be a garage at the far end of this row," Jade added, studying a much-faded plan on the wall. "Guy?"

"Yeah, I'm on it." Guy caught Luke's eye, and Luke nodded. The two of them broke off from the main group and worked their way through the tangle of warehouses to the far end, where one wall was broken up by a series of sliding metal doors. The rows of shelves that had characterized the previous rooms were missing, and instead the vast open space was filled with transport vehicles of various shapes and sizes.

Luke rolled his eyes, watching Guy perk up at the sight and take a few eager steps towards the closest vehicle. But when Guy pointed him towards a desk near the wall, he went without complaint.

"See if you can find the starters, would you? They wouldn't have kept them too far away."

Most of the vehicles were in pieces, or obviously missing parts, or still connected by wires to all sorts of machinery-- the most impressive of the lot, the ones with thick metal plating and slots that were probably meant as gun mounts, were unfortunately the ones in the worst shape. The rest had likely been intended for transport of goods rather than offensive maneuvers-- they were wide, flat trucks, open-topped, running on thick treads instead of tires. They had reinforced decks, at least, and a narrow railing and ledge around the outside of the box, which could be defensible, but the driver's area wasn't much more than a protruding shelf on the front end.

Still, those were the only vehicles that seemed to be whole, and some of them at least started up smoothly enough when Guy ran through the proper sequence. After a few moments of inspection-- during which Guy mostly just closed his eyes and listened to the way the engines hummed-- Guy nodded. "We can work with these, I think."

By the time Guy had picked out three vehicles that seemed the most likely to actually get them where they were going without breaking down halfway, the others had started to appear with crates of gear and bits of machinery slung over their shoulders. Seifer had a disturbingly wide grin on his face as he dumped two massive guns down next to one of their trucks, and even Squall was looking a little smug as he set down the accompanying boxes of ammunition.

Time passed in a blur of creative crisis management and frantic organization; they made up strategies between as they went, picking through their scavenged equipment and portioning it out between the three vehicles. On a few occasions, Luke found himself ranging out on search missions-- looking for stronger clamps, or wire, or a screwdriver or whatever else was needed. Eventually, it all began to come together, and he started to truly think they might stand a chance of making their crazy scheme work.

Their vehicles, by the time they were done with them, bore little resemblance to the humble little transports they had been. There were guns mounted on the railings around the vehicles' boxes, fastened as securely as they could manage, with crates of extra ammo settled beneath. Another gun was loosely tethered near the front of each, behind the shield of makeshift armoring some enterprising soul had welded around the driver's seat. It wasn't an elegant arrangement-- in fact, in Luke's opinion it was pretty damned ugly, so obviously cobbled together from scraps-- but so long as it was functional the rest didn't really matter.

During one of the forays for parts, Auron had even unearthed some protective clothing in the back corner of a storage room, no doubt intended for some army or other. It wasn't armour like Luke was used to, but rather a kind of close-fitting, dense fabric fused to flexible plates. A little too tight and stiff to be comfortable, but lighter than he expected, and certainly better for deflecting claws than his regular clothes. After seeing what had happened to Squall, the last time they'd faced the infected, he was willing to put up with a little discomfort if it would keep him in one piece.

Besides, Guy looked _good_ in all that tight black.

When they rolled open the big garage doors in preparation for departure, Luke was vaguely surprised to look at the sun and realize it was still a few hours to midday. It seemed like they had been working for much longer. By their earlier calculations, it would be just over an hour to the crater if they made good time and the terrain was with them, which still left plenty of daylight for them to work in-- none of them really wanted to be out there fighting in the dark if they could help it.

During most of their preparations, Jade had been sitting off by himself, poking at the small pieces of equipment he'd gathered for his own nefarious purposes. When they were just about ready to go, he finally got up and wandered over to the rest of the group. "I need a few more minutes here," he said. "If you want to take two of the vehicles ahead, I can catch up after I'm done."

Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed up whatever he'd been working on and disappeared back into the other room. Luke blinked after him, exchanging a puzzled look with Guy while, across the way, Rush heaved a sigh.

"Probably shouldn't leave him by himself, hunh? Guess we're waiting, then." Rush boosted himself up on and empty crate and settled his chin in his hands.

"I wonder what he's planning?" Basch asked, settling a last armload of gear.

Luke shook his head, shrugging. "Probably best not to ask," he answered dryly. He grabbed the side of his truck and climbed in, stepping carefully over the piles of supplies to wedge himself down near the front of the box. Squall and Seifer climbed in after him, stationing themselves to either side, near the two rear-mounted guns; Roy sat himself opposite Luke, nodding at him solemnly. Guy settled into the driver's chair and revved up the engine.

"Here we go," Luke muttered to no one in particular.

Luke didn't have to see Guy to know that he would be smiling at the way the transport rumbled as it slid through the open door. The scattered debris on the garage floor crunched easily beneath the heavy treads, barely making them shake; out in the city proper, they still had to dodge around the worse of the rubble, but the vehicles lived up to their expectations and they made good time.

The third vehicle did indeed catch up to them just outside the city limits; Luke could just see Jade sitting in the back, looking inscrutable as always. The three trucks fell into a wedge formation either by plan or by instinct, arrowing their way out into the countryside, guided by charts and photos that Luke could only hope were accurate enough. The trip seemed to take ages, though he knew objectively that their goal wasn't too far away-- it was too much waiting, that was all. Luke checked his weapons again, went over their supplies in his head and mentally recited what each of them was to be used for-- and then made up a few more uses besides, just in case something went wrong. He made sure to keep his shoulders loose and his breathing even, and tried not to think about doing the same thing during the endless night before it all went wrong at Kaitzur.

"There it is," Guy shouted back at them, eventually, his voice tight. Luke propped himself up to see-- there was a slight ridge of land rising before them, with the hollow emptiness of the crater falling away behind it, and just at that divide--

"You've got to be kidding me," Luke muttered, and behind him Seifer started to curse.

Just beyond the edge of the crater were all of the infected, possibly the entire remaining population of the planet. From this distance Luke couldn't even make out individual shapes-- it was just a solid sea of bodies forming a shifting, swaying mass between them and the vague dark form at their centre.

"We don't have to defeat them all," Roy said firmly. "Our goal is JENOVA. These are not the enemy, they're merely an obstacle."

"Right," Luke said, and let out a gust of breath. "We planned for this, right?"

Luke took another deep breath and pulled himself upright, wedging himself carefully into the spot just behind Guy's chair. He braced his knees to either side of Guy's shoulders, pulling over the front gun and getting it settled.

He saw Guy's hands tighten on the controls, felt the transport's rumble beneath them intensify as Guy coaxed it faster, and faster again. The three trucks barreled over the glassy lip of rock marking the crater's edge and started downwards towards the pulsing thing at its centre. JENOVA didn't look like much, still-- looked like nothing more than a lumpy, glistening rock despite the way the surface ripple faintly in the light. It wasn't nearly as big as Luke had expected, either, even as they started to draw closer.

The infected broke towards them in a wave as Guy and the other drivers coaxed the vehicles to their maximum speed. Luke aimed his gun at the leading edge, bracing himself, and fired, punching a hole in the line ahead of them. He gritted his teeth against the jar as they ran right over the fallen; heard the guns behind him start up as Seifer and Squall swept the infected away from their flanks. Felt the sub-sonic shiver in the air as the energy cannon they'd dug up and fastened to one of the other vehicles toppled the next wave of infected in a broad, fan-shaped sweep.

Luke had thought the infected were people, once-- hard not to think like that when they all looked human, still. Seeing them now, though-- they moved like birds, flocking together in unison without any kind of signal or call. JENOVA's will, maybe, moving them like puppets. It was obvious that whatever these creatures had once been, they weren't human anymore.

Luke glanced at the other vehicles just long enough to see that they were still there-- he could see Kimberly at the rear of the nearest one, laughing as he tossed something like grenades out into the crowd and watched them go off. Beyond him, the reinforced metal point at the front of the third vehicle was clearing a path effortlessly, plowing the infected out of the way.

Someone shouted his name-- Luke turned and ducked instinctively, just in time to avoid the swipe of claws aimed at his throat. Wedged in as he was, his mobility wasn't good enough to really fight the thing off but he got in a lucky hit that knocked it back to trip on a toppled crate, sending it over the side to be crushed beneath the armoured treads of the vehicle.

Roy caught the next infected before it got close enough to attack him, grimly slashing at it with a long knife and making it stumble. "Apologies," he grunted, throwing that one after the first.

"No problem," Luke shouted in reply, then turned his attention back to the front to shoot Guy a clearer path.

Despite their efforts, their momentum was slowing-- their vehicles simply hadn't been designed for so much of a beating, no matter their efforts to reinforce them, and it was starting to show. Luke was just beginning to wonder if they had gone far enough when a sharp whistle sounded from the side; he looked to see someone signaling them from the next vehicle over. He tapped Guy's shoulder.

"I see it," Guy shouted up. "Hang on!"

Luke dropped the gun, letting it drag on its tether, and grabbed a handhold instead. He twisted to relay the warning over his shoulder and saw the others grab for their supports just before Guy wrenched the controls, spinning them sideways.

They broke off at an angle from the other two vehicles, methodically cutting a rough circle through the ranks of infected. Seifer abandoned his gun to join Roy at the back of the truck; together they pumped out a thick, pungent incendiary in a broad swath behind them, occasionally supplementing it with bundles of explosives, while Squall kept them covered from the side. They also had a single crate filled with little packets marked in all kinds of warning symbols; these they very carefully tossed out with the rest, portioning them out along the route.

The third vehicle was barreling towards them from dead ahead, the figures in its back just finishing their own line of explosives. Roy stood up straight in the back of their truck's box as the third vehicle swerved around them and kept on going, angling inwards to meet up with the second, which was working through the ranks of infected inside their circle, thinning them out.

Roy lifted his gun, the one he'd been hoarding since Balamb, and the bullet he fired flared green-blue as it streaked off behind them. The line they'd drawn on the ground ignited in a breath-stealing _whoosh_ as Guy gunned the engine to get them away.

Their barrier went up in a line of fire and booming eruptions, a crash and a roar that swept on ever faster as it fed on itself-- and in the midst of it, those little packets at first fizzled and snapped and then _exploded_ in columns of white-hot fire. The bulk of the infected was effectively trapped on the other side, leaving them with a much clearer line to JENOVA-- though the front ranks didn't seem to notice at first, trying to push through the flames regardless and quickly falling to the intense heat.

Luke let out the breath he hadn't realized he was holding in a whoop, seeing their plan actually working before his eyes-- and then lost the rest of his air on a yelp as their vehicle lurched beneath his feet. He looked back when he managed to catch his balance, hearing the shouts of his teammates behind him, and his eyes went wide when he saw them trying to beat out the flames clinging to the back end of their transport, to no avail.

"Guy!" he shouted.

"I know, I know," Guy yelled back, his arms rigid and his fingers white-knuckled as he struggled to regain control of the vehicle. "It went up faster than I thought, we got caught at the edge of the line-- if any of that stuff got on us--"

"It did," Luke answered, heart sinking as he noted the way the flames seemed to be clinging to the bare metal of their truck. The others had given up their efforts to put out the fire, instead just moving forward to get away from it.

Luke looked, noting that one of the other vehicles seemed to be heading their way, then turned back to the three men behind him. "Jump!" he yelled to them, pointing, and they took off without further prompting. They dove into the diminished pack of infected without hesitation, pushing away from the fire as fast as they could and angling for their allies.

"You too," Guy shouted at him, hands still tight on the controls. Luke, for his part, braced himself again and reached for the gun.

"Can't leave you, you know that." He fired off a few shots at the nearest group of infected, thinning them out, and the sound of the gun was almost lost in the ever-growing squeal of metal coming from the vehicle's rear treads.

Guy laughed, though it wasn't really a humourous sound. "Right," he said, "hang on, then." And he gunned the engine once more, ignoring the protests of damaged machinery, aiming them right for the shape at the very center of the crater.

Guy did something that Luke didn't see, wedging the controls so that he could start working himself free of the driver's seat. The wind whipping by them was hot, and smelled of smoke. "All right," Guy shouted, "let's go."

"Ready when you are," Luke muttered, not caring that the words were lost in the din, because Guy's hand was tight around his arm and his own was tight around Guy's, and they were flying through the air and landing with a jarring thud, tucking and rolling as best they could. He hit something soft at first-- an infected's body, probably, but he jounced on past it before it could attack him, if it was going to-- and eventually came to a stop. He forced himself up even before he could breathe again, and pulled his sword free from the harness across his back.

Ahead of them, their blazing vehicle careened onward-- and crashed with a terrible sound into the rubbery side of JENOVA itself. The surface, formerly so still and lifeless, bubbled, rippled-- and burst outwards into a flailing array of limbs.

Luke never really had time to catch his breath-- there were still more than enough infected to keep the two of them busy, although those in the inner ring seemed less capable than the rest, or maybe it was that JENOVA was too distracted by their direct attack to organize them properly. Standing back-to-back, Luke and Guy managed to push their enemies back without too much trouble, though it didn't stop Luke from sagging a bit in relief when the remaining two vehicles came up around them like a shield.

"That fire's not going to last for long!" Luke heard Flynn shout, as their allies jumped down and joined the assault.

"Then let's waste this thing and go the hell home, already," Seifer yelled back.

It was hard to get close to JENOVA-- hard to hit it at the centre, where it would do the most damage, with those limbs writhing around it like that. Luke lost his breath in a whoosh as a dense, whip-like arm caught him right in the midsection and sent him flying. He had to lay gasping for a minute, his eyes filled with the sight of Guy's boots as his friend grimly drove off the few remaining infected long enough for him to recover.

Luke pushed to his feet, wincing at a probable fractured rib, nodding his thanks to Guy even as he swatted an infected away from Guy's back. Luke took a steadying breath, already watching JENOVA and trying to time their next run.

Roy appeared behind them. "Make me an opening," he said, fiddling with something in his hands.

Luke didn't question; he and Guy dove in and pushed out, creating a hole in JENOVA's defenses between them. Roy darted forward with his gun braced in both hands; he fired it with a peculiar hissing bang, again and again, then shouted the three of them into a retreat.

Where he'd fired, JENOVA's rippling surface glowed steadily redder, the skin bulging strangely-- then with a roar the surface burst in an explosion of flame that had all the tentacles around them whipping into a frenzy. Where Roy had fired, the skin of the creature was pitted and blackened, oozing some clear fluid.

With a fierce cry that Guy echoed, Luke dove back in to attack the weakness.

"The fire's dying," someone shouted an unknown time later; Luke looked despite himself, and saw their wall of flame starting to fade from blue to orange. There were bodies jumping through the wall, still moving forward despite being on fire themselves.

"That's not good," he muttered. He twisted and lopped off another of JENOVA's limbs, only to see it replaced mere moments later. "We're not doing enough damage like this," he said. "We need something--"

Another sharp whistle sounded to one side, drawing his attention. He looked over, saw Rush waving his arms at them wildly-- looked past Rush and felt his eyes go wide. "Oh, man," he breathed. "Yeah, that'll do it."

Luke grabbed Guy's arm and pulled, dragging them both backwards out of range, regrouping with a few of the others when they had gained what Luke hoped was a safe distance. They rallied together there, formed up into a defensive circle and holding their ground while David-- who had, with Rush's help, apparently detached the energy cannon from their vehicle and dragged it over-- finished setting it in place.

Luke all but held his breath as David jerked Rush behind him and hit the trigger. For a moment, all that showed was a faint glow at the mouth of the weapon as it charged up, and then it expanded into a billowing stream of power that was ten times as strong as the blast they'd fired off earlier. A higher setting, or something, Luke didn't really know-- but the backwash of the blast was hot and dry against his face, crackling with static charge, and against the glare of it the huddled forms of David and Rush were nearly lost.

The light crested; the growing pressure snapped. There was another sub-audible _whump_ of energy and air, as half of JENOVA seemed to collapse in on itself.

JENOVA shrieked, and Luke cried out as the sound seemed to pierce right through his head. He couldn't quite help but bring his hands up to cover his ears, dropping his sword-- his old instructor would have been furious-- but the remaining infected seemed to be just as affected as he was, staggering aimlessly with their mouths hanging open and their ears seeping red, not even trying to attack.

Luke barely heard the sound of the cannon as David fired again, but he did gasp in heartfelt relief as it made that terrible scream taper off into ringing silence.

JENOVA's outer skin was crumbling, turning dull grey as it broke apart bit by bit. There was still something pulsing at its centre, though-- something that burst out the top of the bulky shape as Luke stared, shooting off into the air at an ever-increasing pace.

"No!" someone shouted-- Luke's ears were still ringing too much to tell who. "It's getting away!"

"I don't think so," Jade said clearly. And he pulled out that device he'd been fiddling with before, pointing it up into the air and firing something out of it towards the escaping mass. Luke held his breath again as the projectile came close, hit-- only nothing happened, and the dark mass that was the escaping JENOVA kept on going.

Jade looked far too satisfied considering that his invention apparently hadn't worked, though-- he tossed the first device carelessly over his shoulder and pulled out another, pressing a few buttons on it with every sign of satisfaction.

Luke flinched as a great burst of flame came from back towards the city, and from that direction something else started climbing into the sky. "What the--"

"A missile," Jade explained, irritatingly smug, "which will track the beacon I just attached to JENOVA. I set it up before we left the weapons facility."

There was silence for a moment, and then: "Is there anything you _don't_ know?" Yuri exclaimed.

"It was a sensible precaution," Jade protested. "It's an alien life form, it's only logical that it might have a way of escaping extra-terrestrially. I thought it best to be prepared."

David and Rush, coughing and red-faced yet looking fiercely triumphant, staggered into their circle; Luke and the rest closed ranks around them, still wary even though the infected seemed to have forgotten all about them. They were all watching the sky, instead, crying out pitifully and reaching their arms up towards JENOVA's shrinking form. Luke watched a little breathlessly himself as JENOVA and Jade's missile both streaked through the air, higher and higher until even his enhanced vision could only pick them out as dots against the white background of--

"Um," Luke said, wide-eyed. "Oh, man. It's gonna--"

The words died in his throat as the two shapes collided together with the third world's swollen, low-hanging moon, and then suddenly the sky was full of fire. The moon's surface seemed to shatter all at once, hazy blue becoming grey in a matter of seconds. All of the infected gave a wailing, multi-voiced scream before falling over dead.

"Oh," Rush said, as the first streaks of red were already painting the sky. "Oh, that's not gonna be good."

"I think a retreat is in order," David said calmly, rising from his crouch, though there was a manic kind of brightness in his eyes.

"Damn straight it is," Yuri replied. "Think those two trucks are in good enough shape to get us all back?"

"They'd better be," Guy said grimly, already running for the nearest. No one protested when he strapped himself into the driver's seat.

They pushed their remaining two transports to their limits all the way back-- one of them started smoking and sputtering partway, giving out on them before they reached the city limits, but with no equipment to haul they managed to cram everyone into the one remaining truck and make it the rest of the way. The already-ruined state of the city had only been made worse by Jade's missile launch, though, and even their sturdy little vehicle with its welded battering-ram nose couldn't make it through the blocked streets all the way to the portal building.

They ran the last few blocks on foot, pushing themselves full-out while bits of rubble fell from all around them and the sky grew steadily darker overhead. Even with their enhanced agility and strength, they had to backtrack a couple of times and go around when a street ahead was rendered completely impassable, coughing through the growing clouds of dust and smoke. The first wave of falling debris was streaking red overhead by the time the portal building came into view, along with the very welcome sight of Cid gesturing to them from just outside it.

They kept running, right through the place where the barrier had been, and Luke shivered at the tremendous crash and rumble that seemed to shake the ground right at their heels as they pushed inside.

He barely noticed the disorientation this time as they dove through the portal and fell out the other side. He did notice the armed soldiers waiting for them there, hyper-alert nerves jangling at him at the sight. The guards didn't even raise their guns, though, apparently far too stunned by the large party of blood-stained, black-armoured fighters that had suddenly appeared in their midst to actually do anything about it.

They had to fight when they ran into the few little pockets of guards in the hallways, but mostly they ran. Even if they hadn't just illegally activated a portal-- Luke, for one, didn't want to hang around and find out what the reaction would be when the locals found out they'd pretty much just destroyed an entire _planet_.

Luke wasn't entirely sure he wanted to think about that part, himself. He'd much rather think about the fact that against all the odds, they might have actually won.


	12. Chapter 12

The refugees had certainly not wasted the time they'd been away-- the town didn't look abandoned anymore, by any stretch. Roofs had been patched, storefronts opened, gardens planted, and the fireplace in their central hall had been cleaned out and set with a cheerful blaze. Luke and Guy were sitting near that fire at one of the tables, Guy toying with a mug of Cid's tea-- no less toxic the second time around, but at least it was warm-- and Luke staring at not much of anything.

Luke was moping-- just a little, but Guy knew the signs. He knew _Luke_ , and could guess easily enough what was on his friend's mind. He'd thought about it himself, even-- the question of what they were going to do next.

Their odd little group didn't really have a reason to stay together, anymore, now that the mystery was solved and the enemy defeated. And despite not really knowing many of them all that well, Guy thought that he would still be sad to see them all break up and go their separate ways. They'd been through a lot together, after all, and there was a certain connection between them. They were the only ones who really understood the unique position they were all in.

Still, some were already talking, and everyone seemed to have different opinions on what was the best plan of action. Yuri had suggested going back to the second world to follow up on some newly-decrypted information-- another lab, at the very least, a small one in a remote series of keys called Destiny Islands. Luke had rolled his eyes at the argument and muttered that he just wanted to be able to retire on a beach; they'd seen endless advertisements for the nearby resort town of Costa del Sol, after all.

Then there was the fact that Kimberly had vanished after they'd all come back through the portal, which meant that Roy at least wanted to go hunt him down, and he was trying to convince Jade to go along with him. David and Rush wanted to go back to Trabia, to see how David's city-state had survived the uprisings, and to help if they could-- obviously David wouldn't be able to use the Nassau family name and take over where he left off, but he seemed certain that he would figure something out.

Guy had already taken Luke aside and asked if he wanted to do something similar in Kimlasca, but after some discussion they eventually decided against the idea. David's sixty years was a lot different from their two hundred, after all; people like Pere notwithstanding, there were probably few enough who even remembered the name Fabre, and all of Luke's people had had a long time to get used to thinking of themselves as Archadian. Going back and stirring up civil unrest wouldn't be doing anyone any favours.

Guy sighed quietly, looking at Luke over the lip of his mug and wishing that decision didn't make so much sense.

The door cracked open as Seifer and Squall trooped in to the hall, their back-and-forth bickering a familiar sound. Those two still fought as much as ever, on the surface, but Guy thought they looked a lot more comfortable with each other these days-- and with themselves. The two of them sat down, nodded at Guy easily enough-- Seifer did, anyway-- and dug into a pack of rations.

"So," Luke said, with a light-heartedness Guy knew he didn't fully feel. "You decided what you're going to do, yet?"

"Probably going to give the mercenary thing a go after all," Seifer said, shrugging. "Hell, 's not like we're good for anything else, and there's definitely some shit out there that needs fighting. I mean, shit, think about it," he added with a rakish grin. "We'll be invincible. We can name our price."

"Not like there are many that will be able to pay it," Squall muttered, and Seifer shot him a glare.

"Ain't you just a ray of fucking sunshine. This was your idea, princess. Anyway," Seifer finished, "you an' Guy can come along, if ya want."

Luke blinked in surprise. "Really?"

Seifer snorted. "Or not, no difference to me. Ain't gonna say no to another sword-arm, 's all."

"Maybe," Luke said, looking like he was seriously considering it. "We'll think about it."

Guy had to admit there was some appeal to the idea of being part of an elite troupe like that. And it would mean they wouldn't be completely on their own when they left this place. He could deal with travelling with those two, he'd kind of got used to them over the last-- however long it had been since they'd pulled Squall out of that tank. But still--

Seifer studied them a moment, then shrugged again. "We're gonna head out soon, anyway. Tomorrow, maybe, if we can get our supplies together all right. You make up your mind before then, you can come along, or you can track us down after."

Luke's smile at that looked a lot more genuine, to Guy's eyes. "Thanks."

Seifer and Squall did indeed leave the next morning-- surprisingly enough, with Cloud in tow. Guy watched them go with Luke a brooding presence beside him. "This really is it, hunh," Luke said.

Guy didn't answer. Those three were the first of them to leave, but they wouldn't be the last.

When they stuck their heads into the main hall, Jade immediately waved them over. He had their datascreen sitting in front of him on the table, just like always. "You still at it?" Guy asked as he sat.

"There's plenty of data still to be decrypted. Some of it may prove important. And speaking of which--" He pushed the 'screen toward them with one finger, pointing to the text scrolling out across the display.

"What's this?" Luke asked.

"Perhaps nothing," Jade replied blandly. "A memo of some kind, which we obtained at the last facility we visited. It details the concerns one of the project's employees had about whether Archades was upholding its part in the agreement. It seems as though this person had cause to believe the Archadians were creating their own test facilities and keeping some subjects back from the main program, creating a private army for themselves."

"Yeah, that sounds like Archades," Guy said. "I can easily see them wanting a little more for themselves. Could have just been paranoia, though; I don't think Archades has given people much reason to trust them over the years."

"Indeed it could. Except that I did a little digging and found that there is some evidence that supports the accusation."

"So?" Luke asked, puzzled. "You think there are some labs in Archades that we haven't been to yet, then?"

"It seems likely. And," he added, "I imagine that the subjects in those facilities would have been selected much the same way we ourselves were. Prisoners and military candidates. Hostages of war." He gave them both a pointed look, and Guy's eyes slowly went wide as he followed Jade's logic to the conclusion.

"You don't think--" Luke gaped at Jade, having drawn his own conclusions as well. "Asch?"

"There's no guarantee of that," Jade immediately countered, though there was a tiny smile on his face. "There are obviously no records of who was put into this little private army, and certainly no guarantee that any of them survived the process."

"But come on," Guy said, a smile of his own beginning to grow, "can you really see Asch quietly living out the rest of his life as a hostage? Not likely. Sticking him in a tank might have been the only way to stop him glaring."

Luke laughed, the sound a little strangled but something bright and hopeful clear on his face. He met Guy's eyes. "Do you really--"

Guy nodded. "I think there's a chance. And it's not like we had anything better to do, right?"

"All right," Luke said. "Let's go."


End file.
